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Christian Giardina

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Scaling up the Hawai‘i Drought Knowledge Exchange: Expanding Stakeholder Reach and Capacity to Address Climate Change, Variability, and Drought
The Hawai‘i Drought Knowledge Exchange project has been successfully piloting three sets of formal collaborative knowledge exchanges between researchers and managers to co-produce customized, site specific drought data products to meet the needs of their partners. Through these pilots, knowledge co-production has demonstrated how active collaboration between researchers and managers in the design and production of data products can lead to more useful and accessible applications for drought planning and management. Resource managers have strongly embraced the need for better and more timely information on climate change, variability and drought, as these stressors exert a large and costly impact on resources...
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Influences of Climate Change, Climate Variability, and Drought on Human Communities and Ecosystems in Hawaiʻi
Over the past century, Hawaiʻi has experienced a pronounced decline in precipitation and stream flow and a number of severe droughts. These changes can have wide-reaching implications, affecting the water supply, native vegetation and wildlife, wildfire patterns, and the spread of invasive species. Several climate-related factors are influencing Hawaiˈi’s landscapes and contributing to these changes. These include climate change, climate variability, and drought (referred to collectively as CCVD). Climate variability describes how the climate fluctuates on a yearly basis around average values, while climate change describes patterns of long-term continuous change in the average. While it is understood that CCVD...
Wildfire is a dominant ridge to reef threat to human and natural communities in the Hawaiian Islands, with impacts to natural and cultural resources and ecoystem services. Fire regimes in Hawai’i have shifted from very infrequent wildfire occurrence prior to human arrival to greatly increased frequency, intensity, and size over the past 100+ years, almost all of which is driven by anthropogenic ignitions and wildland fuels associated with invasive species, particularly grasses. Recent fire science has greatly increased understanding of contemporary drivers of fire in Hawaiʻi; however, the social dimensions and historical perspectives from Hawaiian language primary sources have not been integrated into synthetic...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Malo‘o ka lani, wela ka honua (When the sky is dry, the earth is parched): Investigating the Cultural Dimensions of Indigenous Local Knowledge Responses to Changing Climate Conditions
Hawai‘i’s isolation, paired with limited water resources, make the archipelago sensitive to reductions in water availability. Drought can take different forms, varying across Island geographies with respect to frequency, intensity, duration, and extent. A drought event can exert hydrological, agricultural, ecological, and socio-economic impacts – and these impacts have been growing over the past century as droughts have become more frequent and severe. While the impacts of drought in Hawai‘i have been recently documented, important gaps remain in understanding these dynamics when engaging with multiple other stressors such as invasive species, shifting fire and climate patterns, pests, and pathogens. In particular,...
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Future of Fire in the Pacific Islands: Towards a National Synthesis for Wildland Fire Under a Changing Climate
Wildfire is a significant yet underappreciated issue on Pacific Islands that threatens ecosystems from ridge-tops to reefs, including native species, waters, human communities, and natural and cultural resources. In the Hawaiian archipelago, the percentage of land burned annually is equal or greater than that burned across the western United States, with most fires occurring in drier nonnative grasslands and shrublands, which make up 25% of Hawaiʻi’s total land area. As island communities face increased wildfire risk due to climate change and other factors, such as continued plant invasions, collaborative bio-cultural stewardship approaches to adaptation will be critical to wildfire management. Fire causes and effects...
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