Historical legacies and the climate adaptation challenge in New Caledonia, Southwest Pacific

This paper reconstructs the long-term Trajectory of exposure and eulnerability (TEV) to coastal climate risks of New Caledonia, Southwest Pacific, to explore how historical legacies continue to deeply influence contemporary climate change adaptation policies. It shows how settlement and land use patterns, as well as socio-political segregation processes inherited from the colonial period, persist in some form today, contributing to both explaining and reinforcing climate risks whilechallenging the emergence of climate adaptation governance arrangements. The analysis further examines how historical legacies shape the institutional and socio-political context that determines how, by whom, and according to which priorities adaptation is defined. It then investigates how these conditions may, in turn, maintain or reproduce historically rooted patterns of exposure and vulnerability. In doing so, the paper advocates for a more systematic consideration of long-term social, spatial and political legacies in the analysis and design of effective adaptation governance systems.