The task is huge. Fiji, located in the South Pacific, 1,800 miles east of Australia, has more than 300 islands and a population of just under 1 million. Like most of the Pacific, it is acutely sensitive to the effects of the climate crisis. Surface temperatures and ocean heat in parts of the southwest Pacific are rising three times faster than the global average. Severe cyclones usually hit the area. In 2016, Cyclone Winston hit Fiji, killing 44 people and causing $1.4 billion in damage, a third of Fiji’s GDP. Since then, Fiji has been hit by six more cyclones. Five of the 15 countries most at risk from weather-related phenomena are located in the Pacific. Fiji is number 14. What Fiji is attempting to do is unprecedented. For years, politicians and scientists have been talking about the prospect of climate migration. In Fiji, and much of the Pacific, this migration has already begun. Here, the question is no longer whether communities will be forced to move, but exactly how to do so. Currently, 42 Fijian villages have been earmarked for possible relocation over the next five to ten years due to the effects of the climate crisis. Six have already moved. Each new cyclone or disaster brings with it the risk of even more villages being added to the list. Moving a village across Fiji’s lush, mountainous terrain is a surprisingly complex task. “We are still trying to explain this,” Satyendra Prasad, Fiji’s ambassador to the UN, told the Guardian last year. “It’s not just taking 30 or 40 houses in a village and moving them higher up. I wish it was that simple.” He drew up a list of things to be moved along with the houses: schools, health centers, roads, electricity, water, infrastructure, the village church. “And in case you were able to do it, you have to move people’s burial places. Try to do it.” If anything, Prasad underestimated the challenges, which are not only logistical – although that element is quite difficult – but also economic, political and even spiritual. The Standard Operating Procedures document is in the final stages of consultation and will soon be submitted to the Fiji Cabinet for approval. “No other country, to my knowledge, has gone this far in thinking about how to make planned relocation decisions at the national level,” says Erika Bauer, an expert on planned relocation who has worked with the UN and Government of Fiji. “These are questions that will be asked by so many governments around the world in the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years.” Abandoned houses on the old site of Vunidogoloa village. Photo: Walter Gerard
1 The first relocation: a (partial) success story
Vunidogoloa, a village of about 140 people on Vanua Levu, the country’s second largest island, has an unfortunate reputation in Fiji. It was the first place to be moved due to the climate crisis. Being, in a sense, a proof of concept, the village has received many visitors over the years. Sailosi Ramatu, who often takes them around the new and old sites of the village, has his appetite. Ramatou, 62, was the village chief in 2014, at the time of the move. Vunidogoloa is a two-hour drive from the island’s main town, Labasa, and when I visited recently, he showed me around the old village. This is where Ramatu was born, where he always imagined he would die. It is now a ghost town. About 20 abandoned houses remain standing, the wind whistling through their open doors and broken shutters. Roofs are falling in, boards are missing, everything is overgrown. What would once have been a green lawn where people met to eat and drink is now a swamp. Discussions about moving Vunidogoloa began in earnest around 2004. Two years later, the community approached the provincial government and asked for help with the relocation. It took the better part of a decade before the new location, about a mile farther inland and higher, was ready for them. Sailosi Ramatu at the old site of Vunidogoloa village. Photo: Walter Gerard The move was a decision of last resort. The village had adapted until it could adapt no more. Down on the sandy beach in the old village, Ramatu showed me cement blocks sticking out of the sand: the legs of his old house. Over the decades, as the water advanced, his family had moved the house once and then again. He pointed out the remains of a sea wall three or four meters from the shore. It was the second to be built for the village, after waves and storms destroyed the first. And that became useless. The idea of moving the village had been mooted since the 1950s when sea levels began to rise, so the community felt they had the blessing of previous generations. Even so, it was painful to leave, and especially painful to leave the dead behind. “We left our grandparents, we left our parents, we left everything. [When] we moved that day [it] it was like moving as strangers to a foreign land. People packing their bags, loading them into a truck…they were crying before leaving their home, because this was the last time.” detail of Fiji showing four villages/settlements threatened by climate change The new Vunidogoloa consists of 30 pale green houses scattered on an incredibly green hillside. In Sera Naidrua’s home the day I visited, colorful fabric hangings covered the walls and a cool breeze flowed through the open windows and doors. She had spread a green gingham cloth on the floor, on which she had placed plastic buckets holding cutlery and colored glass plates, which were ready for lunch: ruru (taro leaf cooked in coconut milk) and cassava. A ginger cat sat next to her. As Naidrua, who is 74, poured cold tea into bright plastic cups, she spoke movingly about the old village. He remembered, as a child, picking the fruit of the dilo tree, which grew along the shore at the old site, and using them to play marbles. But ultimately, he said, “It was a good decision to relocate here.” Before, he said, “We were afraid for our lives because of the cyclones, the waves flooding the village.” Now, “We feel safer here.” To relocate, a community ideally needs two things. “The village must have the land and secondly it must have the resources: timber, gravel, stones, sand,” said Simione Botu, the current chief. “If not… problem.” In these respects, at least, Vunidogoloa was lucky. Villagers did not have to negotiate with a neighboring tribe or the government to move land. They already had land, within mataqali (clan) boundaries, that was considered safe to build a new village on. The tribe also had forest that could provide timber for houses. So while the Fijian government financed a large part of the relocation and the International Labor Organization provided some funding to pay construction workers, the village contributed much of the resources. Even so, mistakes were made. Talk to people working on Fiji’s relocation guidelines, and one omission in particular comes up again and again. The houses at the new Vunidogoloa site were all built without kitchens. The government’s original plan was that each house was to have a separate outdoor kitchen, to be built during a second building phase, after the main house structures were completed, but this never happened. Eventually, the villagers built their own kitchens, some using materials salvaged from the kitchens of their homes in the old village. Houses in the new Vunidogoloa site. Photo: Loren Elliott/Reuters Makereta Waqavonovono, from Climate Tok, an organization working on climate crisis education with rural communities, said what this blunder shows is something more fundamental than just a lack of funding or an unfinished building project: a failure to consult the entire community. than with only a few male village heads. “One of the most striking parts of it is that they forgot to put in kitchens,” he said when asked about the lessons learned from the Vunidogoloa relocation. “Now, what does he say? It means there were no women involved.” The new site also brought new problems. It is located near a road, which allows villagers easy access to larger cities for health care and education, but the ease of travel also means the arrival of alcohol, in a formerly dry village, and what Botu called “criminal behavior.” After the relocation, the village created a committee to police village regulations, particularly around alcohol consumption, noise complaints and anti-social behavior – problems Botu said he didn’t have before. The new location is inland, which makes fishing, part of daily life and a key part of the villagers’ diet, more difficult. Many villagers, Naidrua said, still walk to the old site to fish two or three times a week. However, Naidrua said most people agree the benefits of the move outweigh the drawbacks. The new homes have septic tanks, solar panels and flush toilets. Each family has its own house, whereas in the old location, two or three families would share each residence. It’s much easier to grow food here, away from the swampy, salty soil. It is, for the most part, a success story, an example of relocation done well. Sera Naidrua, pictured at her home in the new village of Vunidogoloa. Photo: Walter Gerard
2 “Draft Zero”: how to start drafting a move
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