Shortage of skills prevail in the region

Kosi Latu  



Once every two years there is an important gathering of the heads of national meteorological services in the Pacific islands countries, territories, as well as Pacific Rim countries New Zealand, Australia and the United States.
This meeting is one of the longer running regional meetings coordinated by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP). 
Its purpose is to provide a forum for the heads of Pacific National Meteorological Services (NMS) to highlight challenges and opportunities relating to weather and climate operational work to both SPREP and other partners in the region.
A great many diverse subjects and topics were discussed, reflecting not just the variety of issues and the roles NMS have to deal with, but also the complexity in the nature of their operations.
It is a field of work that requires background qualifications in a variety of sciences, and with work that often takes its practitioners outdoors to study the elements of the weather and climate.
Some meteorology colleagues hold romantic views of their past work with NMS, harkening back to the days of manual measurements of temperature, rainfall, wind speeds and direction and cloud cover and the like.
Truly, their realised goal then as is ever more so now, was to make measurements or observations about the weather and to record them for various comparative analysis.
These analyses taken all over the world and most certainly here too in the Pacific is what we use today to reaffirm our conviction that climate change is real and happening now.
Meteorology is likely one of the few work professions in the Pacific that sees the direct injection of science graduates into work that is by its nature largely scientific.
This uniqueness also holds a point of vulnerability for NMS: graduates with relevant science backgrounds needed to work in the more specialised areas of meteorology are currently few and far in between.
With the growing trend of improved sustainable development requirements, strategic development now often requires improved understanding of the nature of natural hazards and their future projections against a background of increasing variability in climate and weather and their extreme impacts.
The pressure is thus enormous on NMS to deliver detailed information on the changing nature of hazards (such as tropical cyclones, drought and flash floods, and tsunami) and issue timely warnings ahead of any potentially disastrous events.
Brain drain: Yet their ability to do so is often hampered by a lack of skilled human resources. There is also a quirky twist in that the shortage of expert skills in the Pacific reflects a global trend, so that the few experts the region develops are in high demand in developed countries contributing to the larger “brain drain” problem the region faces with its skilled human resources.
As if that was not enough of a problem for NMS directors to contend with, many face the problem of their services and their national role not being fully understood and in some cases not fully appreciated by the general public. Certainly, this problem (and solution) largely falls upon the shoulders of the directors of NMS to communicate more effectively the role and contribution their services make to everyday life. Further, many NMS find themselves largely marginalised within national budgets. These services benefit work in sectors such as agriculture and water resource management, tourism, construction, and energy and power generation so the frustrations of not being extended a better capacity to expand and improve on these services are understandable.
The solutions to these serious issues may lie in part in assistance to increased scholarships in meteorology, math and physics combined with increased support for NMS in national budgets. However, a bigger picture and answer may lie beyond those actions to provide perhaps a better focus.
Much more than providing a solution that is a means to an end, we must face the increasing reality that with all the pressures of an uncertain future ahead brought about by climate change and sea-level rise, our decision-making must include aspects of our scientific understanding of the problem and analysis of the various future scenarios of a Pacific faced with the reality of climate change.
Our region must now be investing in enhancing our technical capacity at the local, national and regional level to understand and combat climate change. Prompt attention to these matters is essential for investing in making the best possible decisions on our Pacific future.
The directors in the RMSD are well aware of this and have been highlighting these concerns at the national and regional level, and it is high time we address their concerns within our various capacities.
An insight one director gave at a graduating class of meteorologists in the past provided some ominous words to the few Pacific Islands meteorologists in attendance.
He stated that we are now training meteorologists as best possible to be equipped with skills beyond what weather and climate extremes we see today, as current weather and climate may change within the next 20 or 30 years.
We may not have to be guided by worst case scenarios to be sure, but we may well need the comfort of having within our reach our Pacific experts in weather and climate, who may very well be our guiding lights against the winds of change.
If there is one message I would like to include here, it is that we must encourage more of our younger Pacific Islanders to develop their interest in the natural sciences be they for meteorology, or engineering, education or health.
Pacific scientists are in demand now more than ever to fully understand and appreciate their unique Pacific environment and past and to fully appreciate and decide upon our future.
It is timely then that this year’s meeting in Nadi, Fiji, was a special one as it brought RMSD officials to meet with their counterparts in National Disaster Management, a grouping supported and organised by the South Pacific Geoscience Commission (SOPAC) who were having their annual set of meetings also.
It is also the first time that planners of each meeting group collaborated at the regional level to bring these two groups together.
The theme of the joint meeting was Strengthening End to End Warning Systems—Challenges and Opportunities and as such was focused on the commonalities between the two.
These two meetings and two very important groups again reinforce the need for us to continue to invest in our met services and the support we must lend to the early warning systems to reduce our vulnerability to the impacts of climate change.
At the international level, there is now an increasing understanding of the need to support NMS in developing countries.
At the recent FCCC meetings in Bonn, a tentative agreement had been reached to significantly upscale the resources available for systematic observation.
This was largely—thanks to the dedicated attention given to this part of the negotiations by Pacific islands countries delegates—supported by SPREP.

* Kosi Latu is the acting director of SPREP, based in Apia, Samoa.