Assessing atoll island future habitability in the context of climate change using Bayesian networks

Abstract. Atoll islands are threatened by multiple climate change impacts, such as sea-level rise and extreme sea-level events, and ocean warming and acidification. A recent approach to assess climate change risk to these islands is to use multi-criteria expert judgment methods. These approaches can serve as a basis to the development of Bayesian Networks (BNs) integrating expert knowledge and uncertainties to perform climate risk assessments. Here, we use the model structure and expert knowledge of (Duvat et al., 2021), who assessed future risk to habitability for four Indian and Pacific Oceans’ atoll islands, in order to discuss the advantages and limitations of the BN model. Advantages of the approach include the explicit treatment of uncertainties and the possibility to query expert knowledge in a non-trivial manner. For example, expert knowledge can be used to assess risks to habitability and future uncertainties and to explore inverse problems such as which drivers can exceed specific risk thresholds. Our work suggests that BN, though requiring a certain level of implementation expertise, could be used to assess climate change risk and support climate adaptation.