Co-creating a coastal climate service to prioritise investments in erosion prevention and sea-level rise adaptation in the Maldives

While the prioritisation of scarce resources for climate adaptation is becoming a priority for low and middle income countries, the climate service literature addressing adaptation prioritisation decisions is scarce. This paper contributes to filling this gap by presenting a co-creation process carried out in the Maldives among representatives of government, civil society and researchers. Together, we identified the need to improve a ranking method currently used by the Maldivian government to prioritise islands for investments in erosion prevention. As a solution we developed a layered index. The first layer of this index captures the objective dimension of the problem through an erosion hazard subindex, using the three variables wave energy, reef health and reef flat minimum width. The second layer captures the normative dimension through a multi-criteria analysis using the erosion hazard subindex as one criterion next to other stakeholder selected criteria such as critical infrastructure, economic activity, per capita income and the potential to house additional people that resettle from riskier places as sea-level rise progresses. Results of this new ranking method show that socioeconomic criteria were considered more important by the stakeholders than the biophysical criterion of erosion hazard. Among the top-ranked islands are many regional centres but also less populous islands that have a large potential to house additional people. Lessons learnt from the co-creation process highlight the importance of assembling interdisciplinarity teams, fostering mutual learning among project participants, and designing research projects that do not prescribe upfront the exact problems to be addressed and methods to be applied.