Climate-Induced Mass Relocation in Fiji

1 Background

Fiji is a developing island nation located in the South Pacific region, one of the front liners in the climate change battle. For the tiny tropical paradise in the vast Pacific Ocean, the effects of this cataclysm are not predictions for the future but already being experienced in the present. This small island nation is made up of 330 islands and many islets, one third of which are populated. The country’s total landmass is 18,333 km². The two major islands, Viti Levu (10,429 km²) and Vanua Levu (5,556 km²) constitute 87 percent of Fiji’s inhabitable territory. 3

Agriculture is the backbone of Fiji’s economy. A considerable number of people particularly in the rural areas engage in subsistence farming and cultivate various types of cash crops both for export and domestic consumption.

Surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, Fiji has an oceanic tropical maritime climate associated with multiple natural calamities. In addition to sea-level rise, it is threatened by natural disasters such as coastal erosion, cyclones, prolonged droughts, flooding, sea flooding, tidal inundation and tropical depressions. These natural disasters hit Fiji year-in and year-out affecting its economy, hampering social development, harming people, destroying infrastructure and making it an aid-dependent country.

For instance, the 2016 Tropical Cyclone Winston, one of the biggest storms recorded in the Southern Hemisphere, “impacted 62 percent of the Fiji population and caused F$2 Billion in damage (20 percent GDP). It killed 44 people, injured hundreds and left 131,000 people homeless”. 4 The sheer volume of carnage that Winston left behind was far beyond the government’s financial capacity. Hence, the government had to ask for foreign aid. 5

People in Fiji and the entire Pacific region ask “what was our role in the climate change?” and get an unsatisfactory answer. According to a Fijian official, “what makes this an especially bitter pill to swallow is that Fiji and other Pacific nations have contributed almost nothing to global warming. Fiji’s carbon emissions [are] less than 0.004 percent of the world total”. 6 The region is paying for the commercial and economic activities of others in the distant developed world.

Climatologists have observed that in recent years the frequency and severity of natural disasters have increased markedly. 7 In the blue Pacific region, tropical cyclones are particularly disastrous when they make landfall. In 2018, three cyclones were heading towards Fiji. Although they did not make landfall, they brought heavy rainfall, which caused flash flooding and damaged agricultural crops and affected people. Cyclones in Fiji are seasonal, occurring during the rainy season, which starts in November and ends in early May.

Although the IPCC and other multilateral organisations as well as governments have warned, time and again, about the severe impacts of climate change and how countries would be affected in years to come, the Pacific island nations are experiencing it right now. 8

The region will be the first to produce a large body of climate refugees with nowhere to take refuge. 9 Australia and New Zealand both have refused to accept the sinking population of their Pacific neighbours with Australia itself being affected by drought and water shortages.

Despite all these disasters caused by the climate change, climate change sceptics apparently believe that change is not happening in the way and magnitude it is portrayed, arguing that technological advancement will reverse the “concocted severity” of climate change. They believe that the prevailing rise in temperature is good for humanity.

They are, however, oblivious to the fact that the sea level has been steadily rising for the past decades and has claimed many villages in Fiji. Since 2006, the Fijian government has relocated five villages and earmarked 42 others for relocation. Many scientists warn of disappearing nations with the Pacific region taking the lead.

2 Relocation Choice

In the Pacific region, the sea level is rising rapidly, and the impact of climate change on Pacific Island States is disastrously damaging. The sea has swallowed up five of the Solomon Islands since the middle of the 20^th century. 10 Although sea levels have risen an average of three millimetres per year around the world, they are rising faster in the blue Pacific region, where a “natural trade wind cycle has caused an extra build-up of water over the last half-century”. 11 Three millimetres of sea-level rise per year is clearly not a tsunami, but it reduces the margin of safety for low-lying coastal communities.

The small atoll-island nations of Tuvalu, Marshall Islands and Kiribati have already started sinking. On average, these island nations are barely two metres above sea level. 12 As a humanitarian gesture, Fiji has offered to help by selling 6,000 acres of land to Kiribati where its small population of 103,000 could be resettled. According to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the new satellite images show that sea levels may rise up to 60 percent faster than the earlier data released by IPCC. This indicates that atoll nations will disappear much faster than predicted earlier. 13

Fiji has already started relocating villages located near the coastline, which are vulnerable to coastal erosion, sea-level rise, floods and cyclones. The government is not only moving homes but also graves to encourage people to relocate without protest because most evacuees do not wish to leave their ancestral place. They associate a great deal of poignant memories with their birthplaces. 14

According to Professor Holland at the University of the South Pacific, these people “want to stay exactly where they are, where they have been for generations, where their ancestors are buried”. 15 In the meantime, they do not have any options because they are “exposed to the risks of increasing water variability, climate change and extreme weather events [that] lead to losses in livestock, crops, and agricultural incomes”. 16 According to the Fijian government, the country has experiencing a 3–6 mm sea-level rise each year since 1993. 17

For Fiji, relocation is considered to be an effective and durable option. On the margins of the 74^th meeting of the UN General Assembly in 2019, Fiji publicly launched a relocation trust fund for people displaced by climate change. 18 According to the Fijian Prime Minister, such a fund would be “undeniably one of the most effective ways of helping our communities to adapt to climate change”. With the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic and global economic downturn, however, the funding commitment of approximately five million dollars a year may not be met by the donor community.

This will create a conundrum for the Fijian government, given that it has already started relocating low-lying communities away from the rising water that has inundated homes, ruined crop lands by salt-water encroachment, flooded burial sites and left people vulnerable to landslides. The government is adamant about the need to act now, noting that it “cannot wait for communities to be drowned out by the encroaching tides. We need a holistic approach ...  and adequate resources”. 19

Although the Fijian government believes in mass relocation as an effective adaptation mechanism, the scheme is encountering multiple hurdles and has been slow in implementation. It is predicted that people will run out of safe drinking water well before they run out of land. 20

3 Relocation Challenges

Surrounded by the vast Pacific Ocean, Fiji is feeling the pinch of climate change the hardest. It not only “tends to be heavily affected by climate change and natural disasters, but in addition, a large share of its population tends to be poor, and thereby has limited means to cope and adapt”. 21 Every year, as the impacts of climate change intensify, so does the enormity of the task of relocation.

According to a Fijian government official, “in 2015 the government was looking at possibly relocating as many as 676 villages”. 22 This is a staggering figure for Fiji. The government would have to create proper infrastructure such as clinics, schools, roads, bridges and other required facilities to make the newly created villages habitable. However, the Fijian economy cannot afford to pay for the relocation of 676 villages with proper and functioning infrastructure.

The first pitfall that the government is encountering is insufficient funding. According to a joint study conducted by the World Bank and the Fijian government, the relocation project will require a budget of US$4.5 billion for the next ten years to find measures to adapt to climate change. This figure is the size of Fiji’s annual GDP. Given the magnitude of the issues involved and the activities required to be undertaken, the financial resources of Fiji alone cannot cover all the costs. 23

Financial contribution and commitments from traditional donors are also lagging far behind the needs. Due in large part to the lack of funding, the government in Fiji has been sluggish in the implementation of its relocation project. The donor community has been indifferent and in some respects negligent about the severity of climate change and the suffering of Fiji’s people. International donors also do not have any direct interests in rescuing the sinking people of the Pacific at a time when their own economic growth has been slow and unemployment rising.

The second hurdle for the relocation plan is land. The people in Fiji “cannot live without  ...  their land, upon which survival of individuals and groups depends. It provides nourishment, shelter and protection, as well as a source of security and the material basis for identity and belonging”. 24 Bearing this inseparable bond between land and people in mind, the planned separation of people from their inherited ancestral property or giving their ancestral land to the new arrivals is likely to cause more ethnic and tribal tensions.

As Campbell argued, “the act of relocation may be seen as a measure that can create a fissure in this set of relations. This may be particularly so for those who leave their [land], but also may apply to those who may give up some of their [land] for relocatees”. 25 The government is faced with a right-versus-wrong ethical dilemma at the moment. It is right based on domestic and international laws to provide shelter for people who are victims of sea-level rise, inundation, flooding and cyclones; but, it is arguably wrong for the government to confiscate people’s land, which they consider as their identity, status and connected to their very survival, for the relocatees. 26 In Fiji, 87 percent of the land of the native Fijians is legally prohibited to be “sold, exchanged or sub-let”. 27 This puts the government in a legal clash with the people.

In addition, relocation also has cultural significance where most people do not wish to dilute their inherited ancestral culture and way of life with people who might have different cultural practices. For the older generation, this cultural dilution is very difficult to come to terms with, and relocation a bitter pill to swallow.

In the Fijian context, culture has a physical connotation, which is tied to land. For them, culture is a property bestowed upon them from their ancestors, which could be traced back thousands of years. Climate change is disrupting people’s way of life and their peaceful co-existence with Mother nature. Relocating people from one place with one set of values and cultural practices and placing them in a new area will undoubtedly cause friction between communities.

This type of climate-induced conflict was noticed in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 1998. 28 Similar societal frictions could erupt in Fiji, especially if the government intervenes and systematically confiscates land and allocates it to a different group of people. The changes that arise from climate change are “deemed negative within a given cultural frame of reference, making it difficult to predict which of the changes arising from climate change will lead to losses of cultural assets that communities value”. 29

According to one of the village headmen, “we now know that we are being subjected to a gradual, creeping and insidious process which directly threatens our future and our ability to live in our homeland. [We know that] our people will be scattered, and the survival of our unique culture, lifestyle and even our language, maybe lost forever”. 30

Any move to high ground comes with a high price. Fishermen have to travel longer distances to the sea, for example, and then must carry everything up the hill where there is no road or transport. 31 According to a native Fijian tribal chief, “our food is in the sea. We catch fish, crabs and others from the sea; get our taro and cassava [all root crops] from the land; boil the two and feed the entire family”. 32 Relocation creates especially acute problems for the elderly whose adult children have gone overseas for work, and who are increasingly unable to travel the long distance to the sea for their own food.

Mass relocation also raises the chance of competition over scarce and dwindling resources such as water, space, healthcare, education and other social services. It will cause overcrowding, spread of various viral diseases and significant reduction in employment because local companies do not have the capacity to absorb all the job seekers. As such, environmentally induced mass relocation could lead to social disturbances if the government fails to manage the “settler-recipient” relations in a proper way. This conflict over land, water and other natural resources could easily escalate under conditions of scarcity and inequality. Land will become an explosive issue as the sea-level rise forces more people out of their community and they encroach on to other people’s land.

Traditionally, native Fijians have communal family structures where they share their belongings with their immediate family members; however, the new settlers from different communities and tribal arrangements might not be welcomed and, again, this could lead to environmentally induced social unrest.

4 Is a Seawall an Alternative to Relocation?

In Fiji and the wider Pacific region, the speed with which coastal areas are eroding raises a need to look at alternatives to relocation. 33 The best possible alternative is building seawalls, although this activity is “realistically beyond the capacity of many local area communities in the Pacific Islands”. 34

Seawalls are a customary response to coastal erosion and flooding, and help coastal residents avoid having to migrate to higher grounds. They also help prevent salination of agricultural lands and sources of drinking water during king tides and tropical cyclones. Their “disadvantages or alternative response measures, especially among local community members is not known”; 35 however, it is generally understood that building a seawall along the shoreline is indeed an effective barrier to rising sea levels.

Seawalls are hard structures primarily directed at the prevention of further shoreline erosion. 36 It is also believed to be an effective defence mechanism against sea-level rise and tidal inundation. In Fiji, coastal dwellers have built their own seawalls using basic methods and tools. They are, however, poorly designed and constructed, tending to increase rather than decrease coastal erosion. These efforts have been unable to prevent ocean flooding. 37

Fiji and its Pacific neighbours do not have the necessary technical skills and revenue to implement this vitally important project on their own. 38 A lack of “capacity and resources had led not only to poorly designed and constructed seawalls but also to difficulties in enforcing rules and regulations such as bans on sand mining”. 39 The latter could create yet another major environmental challenge if not regulated and administered properly.

Given that the project is costly and the small island developing nations of the Pacific region cannot finance it on their own, all hopes are now pinned on the coffers of the donor community. Though vitally important, the donor community does not see any financial dividend in funding it. This absence of interest makes it less attractive for the international community to invest in the Pacific seawall project. The Pacific leaders as part of their climate diplomacy are increasingly speaking and making individual submissions to the Parties and Secretariat off the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and to multilateral organisations to shift from discussions and negotiations to implementation and action.

It seems that Pacific States’ climate diplomacy is not making headway and has not been able to produce the intended outcome. It is castigated as being a mechanism for goal-setting rather than a tool for action and implementation. It is now time for action because countries in the wider Pacific region are losing their shoreline at an unprecedented rate. The action from the international community has not kept pace with the magnitude of destruction caused by the fast-rising ocean waters.

It is therefore about time for the donor community to step in and help Pacific islanders with the much-needed funds and technical assistance to build protective seawalls and turn the tide against coastal erosion. This will help prevent future social conflicts and mass migrations. The onus is on developed countries to find engineering solutions to develop well-designed and constructed seawalls to retain the islands’ land, in order to protect the affected people and their dignity. 40

5 Conclusion

Climate change and environmental catastrophes are becoming existential threats to the small island nations of the Pacific region. Some island nations have already started sinking and have become uninhabitable due to sea-level rise which has been aggressively surging over the past decades. The greatest challenge that the developed nations would face is a large body of climate refugees.

Fiji, like other island nations, is grappling with rapid sea-level rise – so much so that the government has decided to relocate a big portion of its coastal population to higher grounds. The cost of relocation is far beyond the financial capacity of Fiji. Every year cyclones, torrential rains and floods claim many human lives, destroy residential houses, kill livestock, inundate agricultural lands and contaminate sources of drinking water. When king tides push saltwater onto croplands, those lands become uncultivable, resulting in poverty and chronic hunger.

In addition, the relocation plan has been fraught with multiple challenges, especially funding. The Fijian economy cannot afford to pay for it. Without the financial assistance and technical cooperation of the donor community, the Fijian government will not be able to independently implement it.

A second challenge is the unwillingness of the affected population to abandon their ancestral land and graves. For the indigenous population, land is their identity, status and way of survival. Many tribal chiefs have made it clear that they prefer to die on their land rather than abandon it.

Finally, the relocation plan may cause social conflicts. Some communities might be amenable and welcoming towards the evacuees. However, others might not be willing to give their land, with which their very survival is associated, to “aliens”. This antipathy towards relocatees might result in civil unrest, which could easily spiral out of control.

The best solution to the problem, which is considered to be an effective adaptation mechanism, is erection of seawalls. It is durable and can prevent further erosion of shorelines. Building seawalls is not a new practice. It existed in ancient times to prevent threats to coastal communities from the onslaught of rising water.

Given that the threats of tsunamis, tropical cyclones and sea flooding have increased substantially, building such preventive structures is necessary in a bid to reduce the menace of natural catastrophes and assure coastal dwellers of their safety. In the Pacific region, sea-level rise plays havoc with the lives of the coastal inhabitants. Thus, seawalls are effective barriers and a sustainable solution to be employed to resolve the problem of Pacific islanders.

Due to the global economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the donor community may not be interested in funding climate-related projects – not only in the Pacific region but globally. As a result, people will continue to be affected by the environmental disasters even further. They would lose their homes, land and sources of drinking water and start transnational mass migrations. This will, arguably, become a lot costlier to the international community than building seawalls now and keeping disaster-prone people in their communities.