Climate Change Impacts on the Past and Future Coastal Freshwater Resources of Oceanic Islands

Suny At Binghamton, Binghamton NY

Investigators

Abstract

History has shown that humans have long faced considerable challenges of climate change. Documenting how past people responded to environmental change, through adaptations and innovations, offers vital information for better solutions to present and future challenges. This study focuses on a small island which makes an excellent case study in human history demonstrating the unique ways past communities adapted to unpredictable and changing environmental and climatic conditions. On this small, isolated, and resource-poor island, people lived sustainability for over 500 years despite extreme freshwater scarcity and frequent paleo-droughts. Understanding how past islanders managed changing freshwater availability, however, remains poorly understood. This project takes a convergent approach to ancient adaptations to freshwater scarcity through the integration of archaeology, hydrogeology, geospatial science, and traditional ecological knowledge. Using a transdisciplinary approach, this project will yield a hydrogeological model and will produce a spatial and chronological reconstruction of ancient water management adaptations. In addition to resolving fundamental questions of how past human communities adapted to water scarcity, the project will yield actionable data for contemporary islanders to deploy in mitigating impending risks from climate change today, and a targeted plan to broaden participation in archaeology and geoscience through a range of outreach and training opportunities for multiple students. Overall, this work will offer new insights into the ingenious and sustainable strategies used by past human communities to adapt to changing environmental conditions. These insights will contribute to solving similar problems today. The central goal of this project is to resolve how ancient water management systems emerged over time as adaptive responses to climate change. Recent evidence indicates that the islanders innovated unique adaptations to freshwater scarcity through the collection and management of submarine groundwater discharge (SGD), locations at which fresh groundwater emerges at the tideline. Using a convergent historical ecological framework that integrates expertise in hydrogeology, remote sensing, archaeology, and traditional ecological knowledge, this project will test the hypotheses that SGD provides the most abundant and reliable source of fresh water on the island; ancient water management features were innovated and established to manage/extract SGD during times of increased aridity and multi-year drought events, and dams were built to opportunistically exploit high rainfall events. This project will test these hypotheses through hydrogeological, archaeological, and geospatial data collection. The results will be incorporated into an island-wide hydrogeological model as well as document archaeological features associated with ancient water management. This research will result in broader intellectual and societal impacts by providing a clear understanding of past solutions to environmental and climatic risks, generating documentation of archaeological features imminently threatened by climate change, result in actionable data for stakeholder communities who seek to mitigate these challenges, and offer targeted training and education to diverse students. As issues of climate-induced freshwater scarcity are looming threats across the Pacific Islands, the results of this community-based, convergent research will have broader impacts for a better understanding of both the past and future sustainability of human communities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.