The consensus in Fiji is that the life changes the people are forced to endure are the result of the climate crisis.
Sanjogeeta Kiran, right, with her sister Sulva Kiran, second left, and her children Shivendera, left, and Raajeen, sit amid the debris of their home in RakiRaki, Fiji, on Feb. 24, 2016, two weeks after Cyclone Winston ripped through the island nation. The country’s 332 islands and long coastline make it vulnerable to climate change, especially sea-level rise and storm surges. Winston caused $900 million in loss and damage. Brett Phibbs/New Zealand Herald via AP, File
“We know its effects on our lives,” said Mosese, the receptionist at the hotel where I was staying in Suva, the capital and largest city in Fiji.
The nation of Fiji has 332 islands and, consequently, a huge coastline that is very vulnerable to climate change, especially sea-level rise and storm surges. In 2016, there was Tropical Cyclone Winston, which caused $900 million in loss and damage. It left 80% of the population without power, which took six months to fix.
Mosese’s family, like that of many of the iTaukei (Indigenous people), is from a village in rural Fiji where they own the land. When I was in Fiji a couple of weeks ago visiting my granddaughter, he told me that many people in his village cannot stay there. The sea is swallowing their land.
Sea rise is forcing two kinds of migration: individual and community. In individual migration, individual members are leaving and going to a city or town. During a community migration, the entire community moves inland to escape the sea’s ravages.
In Fiji there is anger and fear. The future for communities and their individual members seems quite unclear. Many young people are moving to the city, leaving older people on their own. With fewer young people, there are fewer caretakers of the older people. In a subsistence culture, everyone is needed to care for everyone.
There also is anger because the people of Fiji know that they had very little to do with causing the climate crisis. Fiji produces a minuscule amount of the greenhouse gases that go into the atmosphere and make the gaseous blanket around the Earth even thicker, stopping the sun’s rays that bounce off the earth. China and the United States emit the most greenhouse gases. Yet residents of Fiji keenly feel the impacts of climate change.
One solution for resisting sea-level rise is quite popular around the world – building sea walls, which shield shorelines from the effects of erosion. This effective erosion control helps reduce not only the impacts of erosion that takes place over time, but also the erosion that happens abruptly during a more severe weather event. This solution, however, comes at a cost – one that the Fijian government can ill afford. So, the iTaukei villages have tried to raise money with limited success.
Fiji and other developing countries have asked rich nations for money for such projects. They have received a limited amount of support for efforts to combat the climate crisis. I am reminded of the parable of the Good Samaritan, where two faith leaders from Israel passed a victim of a crime on the road. But the third, a foreigner, stopped to help him. Fiji needs Good Samaritans.
The Indigenous people of Fiji are requesting help because they are losing their homeland as well as their culture, both of which have been with them for thousands of years.
Their daily lives are changing. More than 60 villages in Fiji have had to be relocated to ensure a supply of fresh drinkable water and to provide protection from erosion and sea-level rise. Too much of the land that the iTaukei villages own is now claimed by the sea and is swallowed up.
The Pacific Conference of Churches in 2016 issued the Tokatoka declaration on climate change, which said in part:
“We are deeply concerned by climate change impacts threatening our very survival in the Pacific, such as sea level rise and extreme weather events putting at risk lives, culture, livelihoods, identity and our communal way of life.”
Mosese added that people from the villages that still exist do go back home occasionally to help. “If you lose the village,” he said, “you have lost who you are. You have lost your identity.”
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