The purpose of our capstone course is to evaluate climate-change related disaster preparedness in a subset of Oceania to identify vulnerabilities and prioritize “action areas for the US to address climate-related risks.”
Our ability to meaningfully identify areas of risk and opportunity, however, is limited by a lack of accurate, current information on social indicators in Oceania.
While data sets exist on the region, Oceania’s size, dispersed geography, and low population, combined with varied government capacity, make data sets extremely challenging to create and maintain. As a result, data sets on Oceania – particularly our research area – is often outdated and do not accurately reflect the regions’ geographic and demographic realities.
Defining our subset of Oceania
Currently, as the United Nations defines it, Oceania includes four sub-regions: Australia and New Zealand, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. There are 29 distinct geopolitical areas, including sovereign states, partially sovereign entities such as American Samoa, and non-sovereign sub-national regions such as Hawaii.
Our research focuses on a subset of the UN-defined Oceania, including:
- Eleven UN member states (Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu);
- Two sovereign nations that are not UN member states (Cook Islands and Niue);
- Seven dependent territories associated with France (French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Wallis and Futuna), New Zealand (Tokelau), or the United States (American Samoa, Guam, and Northern Mariana Islands).
Our research does not include Australia, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand, the three largest and most populous countries in UN-defined Oceania.
A sense of scale in Oceania
Land Area
Oceania has a land surface area of about 3.3 million square miles – roughly the surface area of the continental United States (3.1 million square miles). Australia (2.7 million square miles), Papua New Guinea (178,000 square miles), and New Zealand (103,000 square miles) make up 93% of Oceania’s land mass and are excluded from the target countries.
The total land area for the target countries is roughly 38,000 square miles, about the size of Indiana. These 38,000 miles are not contiguous; rather, they are spread over 1,287 islands. Each state or territory consists of 64 islands on average.
In contrast, the total water area of our target countries, using their exclusive economic zones for measurement, is roughly 10.5 million square miles, larger than the entire land area of North America.
Population
Oceania’s population tells a similar story. Including Australia, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand, about 39 million people live in Oceania. 24.3 million of them live in Australia, 7.6 million in Papua New Guinea, and 4.4 million in New Zealand.
This leaves about 2.7 million people in the study area, about one third of the population of Indiana and roughly 0.03% of the world’s total population.
Considering only land area, the target countries have a population density of about 72 people per square mile. Taking the water area into account, the study area has a population density of 0.27 people per square mile – slightly more than one person every 4 square miles. For reference, Wyoming, the most sparsely populated US state in the contiguous United States, had 5.8 people per square mile in the 2010 census. Alaska had 1.2 people per square mile.
Our subset of Oceania has a combined land mass the size of Indiana, with one third of the population, spread over an area the size of North America.
Data in Oceania
Oceania’s size, dispersed geography, and population, combined with varied government capacity to collect consistent data, makes data sets extremely challenging to create and maintain.
To create data sets someone has to record the data. An established network could report data – like hospitals reporting vital health statistics. Without an established network, however, someone must collect and record the data on the ground.
Government capacity in the Oceania varies widely, making it difficult for countries in the target region to collect and maintain the data sets themselves, either through existing networks or regular collection efforts. It is also extremely expensive for outsiders to get to the target countries, particularly relative to 0.03% of the global population who live there.
External data collection and maintenance
As discussed earlier, the land areas and human population in Oceania are spread out over a region the size of North America.
Travel is time consuming and expensive. For example, airfare from New York City to Tarawa, Kiribati’s main island costs approximately $1500 and takes 26 hours. Kiribati has 33 islands, many of which are not accessible by regular commercial flights. While visiting all 33 islands would not necessarily be essential to accurately collecting demographic data, visiting enough to gather representative data would be extremely expensive and time consuming.
Kiribati is one of just 20 of the target countries and has fewer islands than average.
Given the tiny percentage of the global population living in our study area, the region is unlikely to attract detailed collection efforts from international organizations or external states. Creating and regularly maintaining data sets that capture variation between sub-national islands is prohibitively difficult for an external data collector to accomplish.
Self-data collection and maintenance
The alternative is for countries to collect data themselves.
State capacity in the target region varies widely, however, with states ranging from the 6th percentile (Marshall Islands) to the 73rd percentile (Samoa) on the World Bank’s Government Effectiveness rankings. Some of our target states are independent and responsible for collecting data themselves, while others rely on outside countries with high capacity such as France, the United States and New Zealand.
States also face similar challenges in visiting their own remote islands. Many states have a few large islands and many islands with relatively small populations – 34,000 people live in Kiribati’s capital Tarawa, roughly one third of Kiribati’s total population. Spending the time and resources to collect data from remote islands is challenging for governments with limited capacity.
The result is a set of disparate, often outdated data sets that do not accurately reflect Oceania’s geographic and demographic realities.
Without accurate information, it is inherently challenging to evaluate climate-change related disaster preparedness and prioritize action areas in the region. As such, part of our task must be to carefully identify key deficiencies, create new data sets where possible, and prioritize opportunities for further research.