Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center

Our purpose, activities, and research: 2019-2024

About the Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center

The Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center ( PI-CASC ) was established by the  Department of the Interior  on October 7, 2011 to address the challenges presented by climate change and variability for federal, state, nongovernmental, community, Indigenous Pacific Islanders, and resource managers in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific Islands region.

PI-CASC is one of a network of nine regional centers managed by the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Climate Adaptation Science Center with a goal to provide scientific information, tools, and techniques regarding land, water, wildlife, and cultural resources to managers, community members, and decision-makers in order to anticipate, monitor, and adapt to climate change and variability. 

PI-CASC spans the Pacific Basin, encompassing a unique diversity of landscapes, ecosystems, resources, communities, and cultures, including the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Pacific Remote Insular Areas, the Republics of the Marshall Islands and Palau, the state of Hawaiʻi, and the Territories of American Samoa and Guam.

PI-CASC aims to build and broaden existing networks and collaborations in an effort to discover the best methods to adapt to climate change impacts. Alongside the benefits of the USGS, PI-CASC also includes a university consortium led by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, the only R1 research institution in the Pacific, in cooperation with the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo and the University of Guam, lending the assets of these research and educational institutions and their ties to local communities to PI-CASC’s adaptation efforts.

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(Left) The Graduate Scholars’ hybrid professional development event “Meet the Experts in Climate Science, Management, and Policy” invited community professionals to share their perspectives on possible career pathways.

While fostering ecosystem resilience PI-CASC strives to build technological capacity to address today’s climate challenges and student capacity to support the next generation of scientists and resource managers focused on the future of climate adaptation. We also provide funding and collaboration opportunities for researchers, educators, and students through  programs across the region . 

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(Left) Teachers learn about conducting science with drones, for PI-CASC’s partnership with NASA, at the 2023 Service Learning, Youth, and Community Preparedness Summit in Guam.

A unique setting in the Pacific Islands

Because the Pacific Islands region is predominantly composed of vast ocean expanses, punctuated by isolated emergent islands and atolls, Pacific Island ecosystems display characteristics distinct from continental settings. Many species are endemic and often endangered, and interact within rare and threatened native landscapes and seascapes. Marine processes are critical factors in the region’s climate systems, and their impacts occur more acutely than in many continental coastal regions. 

Beyond tropical beaches, geographies of Pacific Islands are vastly varied, including both low-lying atolls a few feet above sea level and high islands reaching thousands of feet in elevation. Over-developed, diverse coastal plains, often arid on leeward sides, mix with lush tropical forests to encircle mountainous volcanic terrains with dry or marshy alpine summits. The Hawaiian Islands alone span climatic zones from arctic to tropical and have over 500 flora and fauna species listed in the Endangered Species Act.

The ecological diversity of the Pacific region is rivalled only by its cultural diversity. Thriving indigenous cultures interact with other introduced cultures from across the Pacific and beyond. This diversity, woven into the fabric of every island in the Pacific, combines with a strong connection to nature and place to create vibrant communities with significant potential adaptive capacity. 

Climate challenges of the Pacific

(Follow horizontal arrows to see more challenges.)

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Water Resources

Changes in precipitation patterns have the potential for widespread, significant effects on water resources, making freshwater assessments essential for ecosystem management, community planning, and risk management. For areas that see decreases in local rainfall with elevated temperatures, drought frequency, duration, and intensity and wildfires may all increase, while areas seeing more precipitation may struggle with increased frequency and intensity of storms. Whether rainfall is projected to increase or decrease, any change will create repercussions and require informed decision making to manage this essential resource.

Native species

Based on historical and projected patterns of land-cover change in this region, impacts from invasive species and human development are likely to amplify the adverse effects of climate change on island habitats and native species, particularly intensifying the effects of wildfire. While vulnerability of native biodiversity has been quantified in terms of endangered species, it can also be understood in the context of its richness and uniqueness as a whole. Island ecosystems are a natural heritage requiring wise and forward-looking management and stewardship goals and strategies.

Coastal hazards

With rates of sea-level rise in the Pacific region exceeding the global rate, changing climate is predicted to deliver multiple impacts to coastal and low-lying areas, including to fisheries and coastal habitats: greater frequency of wave and groundwater inundation events; greater rates of coastal erosion, flooding, pollution, and sedimentation from runoff; and more frequent and widespread coral bleaching events from increased sea-surface temperatures and ocean acidity. Managers of coastal communities and habitats seek adaptation strategies that address these impacts and other coastal hazards, as well as changes to ocean chemistry and terrestrial hydrology.

Forest management

Over the past century, Pacific region air temperatures have increased, and recently the rate of increase has been accelerating, particularly at high elevations, with wide ranging results, including upward migration of climate zones, spread of insect-borne diseases, and shifts in cloud elevation, formation, and precipitation. Impacts to forest ecosystems are as varied, from salinization events in coastal mangroves to invasive plant encroachment in native montane forests to drying of high-elevation scrublands. Managers seek to understand how forest resource abundance, distribution, and ecological interactions could be affected by changes in environmental drivers.

Climate prediction and testing

Decision makers need access to relevant, usable climate information and data upon which to base their plans, but challenges to access of good environmental data makes development or evaluation of climate projections difficult. In addition, temporal and spatial timescales of available models are often mis-matched with need: resource management works on seasonal to multi-decadal timeframes, making end-of-century climate projections too abstract to commit to adaptation planning, and projections with basin-wide footprints lack the resolution to detect island-scale variability. Local climate variability rivals the importance of long-term, global climate change for supporting resource managers in sustainability efforts.

Adaptation for low islands and atolls

For human communities and living resources in low islands or atolls, climate impacts are so immediate and extensive that adaptation is essentially equal to survival. Government officials seek to better understand and anticipate potential, or actual, human population displacement as a result of climate-related ocean inundation that will affect food security, freshwater security, and livelihoods, to develop programs to protect current ecosystems as long as possible but ultimately to transition the displaced and develop means to preserve cultural identity.

PI-CASC Research Projects

Federal and consortium funds support projects run by researchers, students, and community partners to address the regional climate adaptation challenges described above. The following interactive maps show the geographic distribution of projects funded during the second PI-CASC host agreement from 2019 to 2025, across the Pacific Basin. All the projects aim to provide necessary information for local managers, decision makers, and communities to have the right tools to choose the best strategies to prepare for, and adapt to, a changing world.

Projects on Oʻahu

Projects on Hawaiʻi Island

Projects across the Hawaiian Archipelago

Projects in the Western Pacific

Projects in the Central Pacific

For more about PI-CASC, visit  our website  and follow us on social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) with the handle @pacificCASC