Maladaptive trajectories of change in Makira, Solomon Islands

Trajectories of change are dynamic processes of individual, group and/or societal responses to change which create further change and responses, with outcomes that reflect the cumulative properties of those processes. Understanding trajectories of change is an important initial step for designing appropriate adaptation strategies because even though responses may enable people to cope with change in the short term, the accumulated responses of individuals can generate undesirable maladaptive outcomes over longer periods of time. This paper examines trajectories of change in Kahua, Solomon Islands, where people have traditionally relied on subsistence activities and have in the past been subsistence affluent. Participatory methods, including 76 focus group discussions in 38 communities with 821 individuals, were used to determine changes in the region and its drivers. A conceptual model was developed of the underlying feedback processes within the Kahua social–ecological system. The results show that communities are facing rapid and extensive changes. Most changes, however, are being driven by the two key drivers of population growth and a strong desire for monetary prosperity that act synergistically to generate stress in communities. People are generally responding by focusing on income generation, which is reinforcing stress in communities and resulting in maladaptive trajectories of change. The results suggest development policy in the Solomon Islands needs to: (1) take the challenges of population growth much more seriously; (2) place greater effort on development activities that reduce per capita impact on the environment; (3) improve management of the high expectations for monetary prosperity; (4) increase emphasis on wellbeing aspects of development rather than income generation per se, and (5) better align development with existing adaptation strategies to ensure that vulnerability to future global change does not increase.     

Community level adaptation to climate change: The potential role of participatory community risk assessment

This paper explores the value of using community risk assessments (CRAs) for climate change adaptation. CRA refers to participatory methods to assess hazards, vulnerabilities and capacities in support of community-based disaster risk reduction, used by many NGOs, community-based organizations, and the Red Cross/Red Crescent. We review the evolution of climate change adaptation and community-based disaster risk reduction, and highlight the challenges of integrating global climate change into a bottom-up and place-based approach. Our analysis of CRAs carried out by various national Red Cross societies shows that CRAs can help address those challenges by fostering community engagement in climate risk reduction, particularly given that many strategies to deal with current climate risks also help to reduce vulnerability to climate change. Climate change can also be explicitly incorporated in CRAs by making better use of CRA tools to assess trends, and by addressing the notion of changing risks. However, a key challenge is to keep CRAs simple enough for wide application. This demands special attention in the modification of CRA tools; in the background materials and trainings for CRA facilitators; and in the guidance for interpretation of CRA outcomes. A second challenge is the application of a limited set of CRA results to guide risk reduction in other communities and to inform national and international adaptation policy. This requires specific attention for sampling and care in scaling up qualitative findings. Finally, stronger linkages are needed between organizations facilitating CRAs and suppliers of climate information, particularly addressing the translation of climate information to the community level.     

A linked vulnerability and resilience framework for adaptation pathways in remote disadvantaged communities

We develop a systems framework for exploring adaptation pathways to climate change among people in remote and marginalized regions. The framework builds on two common and seemingly paradoxical narratives about people in remote regions. The first is recognition that people in remote regions demonstrate significant resilience to climate and resource variability, and may therefore be among the best equipped to adapt to climate change. The second narrative is that many people in remote regions are chronically disadvantaged and therefore are among the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. These narratives, taken in isolation and in extremis, can have significant maladaptive policy and practice implications. From a systems perspective, both narratives may be valid, because they form elements of latent and dominant feedback loops that require articulation for a nuanced understanding of vulnerability-reducing and resilience-building responses in a joint framework. Through literature review and community engagement across three remote regions on different continents, we test the potential of the framework to assist dialogue about adaptation pathways in remote marginalized communities. In an adaptation pathway view, short-term responses to vulnerability can risk locking in a pathway that increases specific resilience but creates greater vulnerability in the long-term. Equally, longer-term actions towards increasing desirable forms of resilience need to take account of short-term realities to respond to acute and multiple needs of marginalized remote communities. The framework was useful in uniting vulnerability and resilience narratives, and broadening the scope for adaptation policy and action on adaptation pathways for remote regions.     

Co-management and the co-production of knowledge: Learning to adapt in Canada's Arctic

Co-management institutional arrangements have an important role in creating conditions for social learning and adaptation in a rapidly changing Arctic environment, although how that works in practice has not been clearly articulated. This paper draws on three co-management cases from the Canadian Arctic to examine the role of knowledge co-production as an institutional trigger or mechanism to enable learning and adapting. Experience with knowledge co-production across the three cases is variable but outcomes illustrate how co-management actors are learning to learn through uncertainty and environmental change, or learning to be adaptive. Policy implications of this analysis are highlighted and include the importance of a long-term commitment to institution building, an enabling policy environment to sustain difficult social processes associated with knowledge co-production, and the value of diverse modes of communication, deliberation and social interaction.     

Assessing changing vulnerability to dengue in northeastern Brazil using a water-associated disease index approach

Water management practices and access to safe water supplies have major implications for human health. While a range of assessments has been developed to assess water vulnerability, limited work has extended these concepts to health and wellbeing. Water-associated disease cycles are characterized by complex linkages between social and ecological determinants, thus conceptualizing vulnerability in the context of health offers a useful framework for analysis. This paper applies a water associated disease index (WADI) as a tool to deepen understanding of changing vulnerability to dengue, comparing conditions in 2000 and 2010 in Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil. Multi-dimensional data were integrated into indicators of exposure and susceptibility using the WADI approach, including water access, land cover, climate, and solid waste collection, and outputs were validated and visualized in map form. The findings illustrate heterogeneous patterns of vulnerability to dengue in the region, and highlight trends of seasonal and long-term changes. Highest vulnerability was observed in densely populated Recife and the surrounding coastal region in both time periods, with climate conditions creating seasonal trends in exposure to dengue. While more remote areas in the semi-arid Sertão showed low vulnerability overall, increases were observed in some areas between 2000 and 2010 due to land use intensification and growing population densities. These findings suggest that interventions should consider the dynamic nature of social and ecological factors that contribute to health outcomes and address current as well as future populations vulnerable to dengue transmission. This vulnerability mapping approach can be applied to other water-associated diseases impacted by global environmental change to highlight priority areas for further investigation and contribute towards improving interventions.     

How inequitable is the global distribution of responsibility, capability, and vulnerability to climate change: A comprehensive indicator-based assessment

While it is generally asserted that those countries who have contributed least to anthropogenic climate change are most vulnerable to its adverse impacts some recently developed indices of vulnerability to climate change come to a different conclusion. Confirmation or rejection of this assertion is complicated by the lack of an agreed metric for measuring countries’ vulnerability to climate change and by conflicting interpretations of vulnerability. This paper presents a comprehensive semi-quantitative analysis of the disparity between countries’ responsibility for climate change, their capability to act and assist, and their vulnerability to climate change for four climate-sensitive sectors based on a broad range of disaggregated vulnerability indicators. This analysis finds a double inequity between responsibility and capability on the one hand and the vulnerability of food security, human health, and coastal populations on the other. This double inequity is robust across alternative indicator choices and interpretations of vulnerability. The main cause for the higher vulnerability of poor nations who have generally contributed little to climate change is their lower adaptive capacity. In addition, the biophysical sensitivity and socio-economic exposure of poor nations to climate impacts on food security and human health generally exceeds that of wealthier nations. No definite statement can be made on the inequity associated with climate impacts on water supply due to large uncertainties about future changes in regional water availability and to conflicting indicators of current water scarcity. The robust double inequity between responsibility and vulnerability for most climate-sensitive sectors strengthens the moral case for financial and technical assistance from those countries most responsible for climate change to those countries most vulnerable to its adverse impacts. However, the complex and geographically heterogeneous patterns of vulnerability factors for different climate-sensitive sectors suggest that the allocation of international adaptation funds to developing countries should be guided by sector-specific or hazard-specific criteria despite repeated requests from participants in international climate negotiations to develop a generic index of countries’ vulnerability to climate change.     

Social cohesion and passive adaptation in relation to climate change and disease

Climate change affects biophysical processes related to the transmission of many infectious diseases, with potentially adverse consequences for the health of communities. While our knowledge of biophysical associations between meteorological factors and disease is steadily improving, our understanding of the social processes that shape adaptation to environmental perturbations lags behind. Using computational modeling methods, we explore the ways in which social cohesion can affect adaptation of disease prevention strategies when communities are exposed to different environmental scenarios that influence transmission pathways for diseases such as diarrhea. We developed an agent-based model in which household agents can choose between two behavioral strategies that offer different levels of protection against environmentally mediated disease transmission. One behavioral strategy is initially set as more protective, leading households to adopt it widely, but its efficacy is sensitive to variable weather conditions and stressors such as floods or droughts that modify the disease transmission system. The efficacy of the second strategy is initially moderate relative to the first and is insensitive to environmental changes. We examined how social cohesion (defined as average number of household social network connections) influences health outcomes when households attempt to identify an optimal strategy by copying the behaviors of socially connected neighbors who seem to have adapted successfully in the past. Our simulation experiments suggest that high-cohesion communities are able to rapidly disseminate the initially optimal behavioral strategy compared to low-cohesion communities. This rapid and pervasive change, however, decreases behavioral diversity; i.e., once a high cohesion community settles on a strategy, most or all households adopt that behavior. Following environmental changes that reduce the efficacy of the initially optimal strategy, rendering it suboptimal relative to the alternative strategy, high-cohesion communities can fail to adapt. As a result, despite faring better early in the course of computational experiments, high-cohesion communities may ultimately experience worse outcomes. In the face of uncertainty in predicting future environmental stressors due to climate change, strategies to improve effective adaptation to optimal disease prevention strategies should balance between intervention efforts that promote protective behaviors based on current scientific understanding and the need to guard against the crystallization of inflexible norms. Developing generalizable models allows us to integrate a wide range of theories and multiple datasets pertaining to the relationship between social mechanisms and adaptation, which can provide further understanding of future climate change impacts. Models such as the one we present can generate hypotheses about the mechanisms that underlie the dynamics of adaptation events and suggest specific points of measurement to assess the impact of these mechanisms. They can be incorporated as modules within predictive simulations for specific socio-ecological contexts.     

The importance of deliberation in valuing ecosystem services in developing countries—Evidence from the Solomon Islands

Monetary valuation of ecosystem services enables more accurate accounting of the environmental costs and benefits of policies, but this has rarely been applied in developing countries. In such contexts, there are particular methodological and epistemological challenges that require novel valuation methodologies. This paper introduces a new participatory, deliberative choice experiment approach conducted in the Solomon Islands. The research aimed to determine the value people placed on ecosystem services and whether participatory interventions to elicit deeper held values influenced the preferences expressed. Results found that the initial willingness to pay for a number of tropical forest ecosystem services amounted to 30% of household income. Following deliberative intervention exercises, key ecosystem services effectively became priceless as participants were unwilling to trade them off in the choice experiment scenarios, regardless of financial cost. The group based deliberative approach, combined with participatory interventions, also resulted in significant learning for participants. This included a more sophisticated view of ecological-cultural linkages, greater recognition of deeper held values, and greater awareness of the consequences of human actions for the environment. The use of a group-based participatory approach instead of a conventional individual survey helped to overcome many of the practical difficulties associated with valuation in developing countries. Given the impact of learning on valuation outcomes, participation and deliberation should be integrated into valuation of any complex good, both in developing and developed economies. However, such a methodology raises questions about how valuation can deal with unwillingness to trade-off key ecosystem services, which results in the breakdown of monetary valuation methods. Evaluation of the appropriateness of valuation processes and methodologies for assessing deeper held values and use of mixed-method approaches will be essential to ensure policies take into account the extent to which human life is dependent on ecosystem services.     

A method for quantifying vulnerability, applied to the agricultural system of the Yaqui Valley, Mexico

We propose measuring vulnerability of selected outcome variables of concern (e.g. agricultural yield) to identified stressors (e.g. climate change) as a function of the state of the variables of concern relative to a threshold of damage, the sensitivity of the variables to the stressors, and the magnitude and frequency of the stressors to which the system is exposed. In addition, we provide a framework for assessing the extent adaptive capacity can reduce vulnerable conditions. We illustrate the utility of this approach by evaluating the vulnerability of wheat yields to climate change and market fluctuations in the Yaqui Valley, Mexico.     

Seeing the forest and the trees: Facilitating participatory network planning in environmental governance

Governance processes to address environmental change involve many different actors from multiple spatial, temporal and socio-political scales, not all of whom are connected by hierarchy and whose actions cannot always be mandated. In the environmental governance literature, Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been found useful in understanding complex governance arrangements. In this paper we present and reflect on our experience with the Net-Map tool for participatory network mapping. The Net-Map tool was applied in three transdisciplinary case studies for three different purposes: (a) to contribute to an improved understanding of biodiversity knowledge flows in Europe, (b) to explore the interplay between actors with influence on water, agriculture, and energy developments at the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, and (c) to understand the challenges facing stakeholders engaged in conservation and economic development in a Southeast Asian mountain range. The case studies explore how network maps can serve as boundary objects to engage stakeholders of diverse points of view and jointly design strategies to address governance challenges. More specifically they show how network maps are used to gain a better understanding of governance situations, to help stakeholders identify strategies for navigation of the complex networks in which they are embedded and to support transdisciplinary research processes. We close with some reflections on the potential and limitations of the Net-Map tool in facilitating multi-stakeholder processes and disentangling complex governance arrangements.     

Phosphorus vulnerability: A qualitative framework for assessing the vulnerability of national and regional food systems to the multi-dimensional stressors of phosphorus scarcity

The element phosphorus underpins the viability of global and national food systems, by ensuring soil fertility, maximising crop yields, supporting farmer livelihoods and ultimately nutritional security of the global population. The implications of global phosphorus scarcity therefore have serious potential consequences for future food security, yet these implications have not been be comprehensively or sufficiently assessed at the global or national scales. This paper offers a new integrated framework for assessing the vulnerability of national food systems to global phosphorus scarcity—the Phosphorus Vulnerability Assessment framework. Drawing on developments in assessing climate and water vulnerability, the framework identifies and integrates 26 phosphorus-related biophysical, technical, geopolitical, socio-economic and institutional factors that can lead to food system vulnerability. The theoretical framework allows analysis of context-specific food system by examining impact due to exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. The framework will also ultimately provide guidance for food and agriculture policy-makers, phosphate producers and phosphorus end-users (primarily farmers and consumers) to take action to reduce their vulnerability to this new global challenge.     

Farmers’ coping response to the low flows in the lower Yellow River: A case study of temporal dimensions of vulnerability

Water scarcity in northern China has been a topic of concern in China for many years, but the increased frequency and duration of “no-flow” events in the Yellow River in the 1990s created a flurry of recent activity in the academic and policy arenas. These low-flow events severely disrupted the supply of irrigation water for agriculture in the lower reaches of the Yellow River and posed a substantial threat to farmers’ livelihoods. Within a broader effort to assess farmers’ vulnerability to water shortages, this qualitative research focuses on the coping mechanisms and adaptive strategies adopted by farming households in three villages in Shandong Province (Ma, Ding, and Xing). With increasing water stress and other stresses from land degradation and lack of market access, farmers’ coping mechanisms have evolved, expanding from one-time adjustments to long-term adaptations, and switching focus from securing reliable water sources to improving irrigation efficiency and diversifying both on-farm and off-farm production. The three villages have different vulnerability profiles and adopted different patterns of adaptive processes that reveal the key roles played by community leaders and the early innovators. The research presented here contributes a temporal and dynamic dimension to the study of vulnerability which is largely missing from the current literature, and provides practical insights about how to improve farmers’ adaptive capacities in the face of water shortages in northern China.     

A conceptual framework for analysing adaptive capacity and multi-level learning processes in resource governance regimes

Governance failures are at the origin of many resource management problems. In particular climate change and the concomitant increase of extreme weather events has exposed the inability of current governance regimes to deal with present and future challenges. Still our knowledge about resource governance regimes and how they change is quite limited. This paper develops a conceptual framework addressing the dynamics and adaptive capacity of resource governance regimes as multi-level learning processes. The influence of formal and informal institutions, the role of state and non-state actors, the nature of multi-level interactions and the relative importance of bureaucratic hierarchies, markets and networks are identified as major structural characteristics of governance regimes. Change is conceptualized as social and societal learning that proceeds in a stepwise fashion moving from single to double to triple loop learning. Informal networks are considered to play a crucial role in such learning processes. The framework supports flexible and context sensitive analysis without being case study specific.First empirical evidence from water governance supports the assumptions made on the dynamics of governance regimes and the usefulness of the chosen approach. More complex and diverse governance regimes have a higher adaptive capacity. However, it is still an open question how to overcome the state of single-loop learning that seem to characterize many attempts to adapt to climate change. Only further development and application of shared conceptual frameworks taking into account the real complexity of governance regimes can generate the knowledge base needed to advance current understanding to a state that allows giving meaningful policy advice.     

Assessing vulnerability of selected farming communities in the Philippines based on a behavioural model of agent's adaptation to global environmental change

Behavioural models that allow simple representation of the complexity of human–environment links are important in vulnerability assessment because they allow the analysis of human adaptive processes in a changing environment. This paper applies an agent-based framework that considers the behavioural model of farmers in three villages in a municipality in the Philippines. Agent-based modelling is a useful policy tool for simulating the effects of different adaptation options on reducing vulnerability because it allows representation of not only the dynamic changes in climate and market but also the dynamic adaptive process of different groups of communities to the impacts of these changes. Model simulations of adaptation options under various global change scenarios showed that production support would significantly reduce future vulnerability only if complemented with appropriate market support. It is thus important for policy to provide a complementary bundle of adaptation measures. Lack of money and information are the most important reasons for not applying available technical adaptation measures, which currently hinder reduction of vulnerability in selected villages in the municipality. Social networks, which play an important role in adapting to environmental changes, are limited to relatives and neighbours, who are important sources of informal credit.     

2006-2016年昆明市雷电致灾因素分析及易损性风险区划

基于近11 a（2006-2016）云南省闪电定位监测数据以及雷电灾害汇编资料,运用ArcGIS对闪电数据与地理信息进行叠加,分析昆明市地闪活动规律和雷电灾害时空分布特征,结合地理环境、人口分布和经济社会发展情况,研究雷电致灾成因机制。从灾害系统理论和综合易损性出发,构建评价指标体系及权重判断矩阵,计算雷电灾害风险综合评价指数R值并进行分级,形成昆明市雷电灾害易损性风险区划。结果表明：频繁活跃的地闪活动是导致雷电灾害多发的主要致灾影响因子,雷电灾害的时空分布与地闪活动的变化特征存在较好的对应关系。全市有雷电灾害高易损区3个,次高易损区2个,中易损区4个,次低易损区4个,低易损区1个,建立雷电灾害易损性区划,能够为确定雷电防护重点和防范等级提供必要的参考依据,通过完善雷电防护措施,可以增强承灾体抵御雷电灾害的能力。     

Poverty, sustainability and human wellbeing: A social wellbeing approach to the global fisheries crisis

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which a social wellbeing approach can offer a useful way of addressing the policy challenge of reconciling poverty and environmental objectives for development policy makers. In order to provide detail from engagement with a specific policy challenge it takes as its illustrative example the global fisheries crisis. This crisis portends not only an environmental disaster but also a catastrophe for human development and for the millions of people directly dependent upon fish resources for their livelihoods and food security. The paper presents the argument for framing the policy problem using a social conception of human wellbeing, suggesting that this approach provides insights which have the potential to improve fisheries policy and governance. By broadening the scope of analysis to consider values, aspirations and motivations and by focusing on the wide range of social relationships that are integral to people achieving their wellbeing, it provides a basis for better understanding the competing interests in fisheries which generate conflict and which often undermine existing policy regimes.     

Securing Indigenous politics: A critique of the vulnerability and adaptation approach to the human dimensions of climate change in the Canadian Arctic

Over the past decade research examining the human dimensions of climatic change in the Arctic has expanded significantly and has become the dominant framework through which the relations between northern peoples and climatic change are understood by scholars, policy makers, political leaders, and the media. This paper critically examines the assumptions, exclusions, and orientations that characterize this broad literature, and suggests revising and expanding the terms upon which it is carried out. It focuses in particular on the exclusion of colonialism from the study of human vulnerability and adaptation to climatic change, the framing of Indigenous peoples and communities in terms of the local and the traditional, and the ways in which efforts to improve the lives of northern Indigenous peoples risk perpetuating colonial relations. The paper argues that these exclusions and orientations lead scholars to systematically overlook the immense importance of resource extraction and shipping as human dimensions of climatic change in the Canadian Arctic, and it examines the implications of such oversights.     

Opening space for equity and justice in resilience: A subjective approach to household resilience assessment

While resilience has grown to become a well-established goal of policy and practice, assessing resilience remains an outstanding problem. To date, measurement has largely relied on the identification of proxy indicators, inevitably shaping what is measured in ways that reflect underlying assumptions, generalisations and approximations, and raising the question of whose values are being embedded into resilience. These concerns reflect recent interest in the role of recognition justice in resilience, and in particular how marginalisation from meaning-making processes creates the conditions for the inequitable distribution of outcomes in practice. Here, we propose a two stage, subjective approach to resilience assessment, starting with rapid household interviews that invite participants to assess the likely impact of multiple shock and stressor storylines. In a second step, participatory qualitative methods are employed to support inductive investigation of resilience focused on the factors that differentiate those reporting relatively high and low resilience. We illustrate this using fieldwork data from 569 households in Bangladesh. This subjective approach enables households to engage in the production of knowledge about their resilience, revealing two core features of situated heterogeneity: the forms of difference, and the underlying causes. Underlying causes arise from interactions and feedbacks between social, political, economic and institutional conditions that are highly context specific, while significant forms of difference include intra-community and scalar heterogeneity; vulnerability to specific or generalised shocks; and the role of undesirable practices in securing resilience. The results underline the need for resilience to be assessed in relation to local understandings of precarity, and through the expression of senses of justice that inform local conceptions of wellbeing. This means moving beyond positivist approaches and placing epistemic diversity at the centre of resilience assessment, enabling the production of a situated understanding of how and why resilience is differentiated, and offering an analytical starting point from which policy and practice can drive towards equitable resilience.     

东北三省玉米主要农业气象灾害综合危险性评估

东北三省是中国玉米主产区之一,也是“东北玉米带”的重要组成部分。气候变化背景下东北三省农业气象灾害的高发、频发已经严重地威胁到该地区玉米的生产安全,迫切需要弄清玉米主要农业气象灾害的综合危险性,为玉米防灾、减灾措施的制定提供依据。基于1981—2010年东北三省气象数据,结合最大熵模型对东北三省玉米主要农业气象灾害(低温、干旱和洪涝)综合危险性进行了评估。结果表明,低温冷害对玉米主要农业气象灾害综合危险性的贡献率随时间成减少趋势,旱灾对玉米主要农业气象灾害综合危险性的贡献率则随时间成增加趋势,洪涝灾害对玉米主要农业气象灾害综合危险性的贡献率随时间呈先减小后增加趋势。1981—2010年各农业气象灾害对玉米主要农业气象灾害综合危险性的平均贡献表现为低温冷害> 干旱> 洪涝。东北三省玉米主要农业气象灾害危险性由北向南成减小趋势,其高值区主要位于东北三省的东北部大兴安岭地区。黑龙江省的低温冷害和洪涝灾害危险性较大,而吉林和辽宁省沿海地区气候条件较好,玉米生产受农业气象灾害影响较小。1981—2010年东北三省玉米3种主要农业气象灾害综合危险性高值区随时间变化成减小趋势,低值区随时间变化成增加趋势。同时,基于最大熵模型构建了东北三省玉米3种主要农业气象灾害综合危险性评估模型,其ROC(Receiver operating characteristic curve)下的面积达0.823,表明该模型可以很好地模拟东北三省灾害综合危险性分布。     

Plastic Drawdown: A rapid assessment tool for developing national responses to plastic pollution when data availability is limited,as demonstrated in the Maldives

Governments are increasingly supporting initiatives to address plastic pollution, but efforts are largely opportunistic or driven by national socio-political priorities. There is an urgent need to move away from piecemeal single product instruments (e.g. single use plastic bag taxes or plastic straw bans) to deliver system-wide strategies that minimise the most pervasive sources of plastic pollution. Developing a common understanding of a jurisdiction’s plastic waste stream and the solutions available to decision-makers is vital to build consensus across stakeholders and to align on an evidence-based portfolio of priority instruments.This paper presents the Plastic Drawdown framework as a boundary-spanning tool to quickly create a coherent, relevant, and credible analysis and visualisation for stakeholders of plastic waste, leakage hotspots and minimisation opportunities. Using a new plastic waste modelling framework with a consultative structure, Plastic Drawdown explores plastic waste and leakage over a ten-year period and assesses impacts of policy instruments on this projection. Plastic Drawdown is adaptable to the data poor environment typical of many countries and designed as a rapid assessment tool to support the decision making of governments operating in a highly resource-constrained context.The Maldives is used as a case study to show the utility of the tool, where it highlighted strategies with the potential to reduce leakage of plastic waste into the marine environment by up to 85% by 2030. Plastic Drawdown built the case for phasing out single-use plastic waste across the Maldives and supported the Government’s decision to set ambitious targets, as announced at the United Nations General Assembly in 2019.