For the past four years, a special government group in Fiji has been trying to figure out how to move the country. The plan he created is 130 pages of dense text, interspersed with intricate spider graphics and detailed timelines. The document has an uninspiring title: Standard Operating Procedures for Planned Relocations, but it is the most comprehensive plan ever devised to deal with one of the most pressing consequences of the climate crisis: how to move communities home of which they will soon be, or already are, under water.
The task is enormous. Located in the South Pacific, 1,800 miles east of Australia, Fiji has more than 300 islands and a population of just under 1 million. Like most of the Pacific, it is highly susceptible to the impacts 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 regularly hit the region. 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 of climate-related events are located in the Pacific. Fiji is number 14.
What Fiji is trying to do is unprecedented. For years, politicians and scientists have been talking about the prospect of climate migration. In Fiji, and in much of the Pacific, this migration has already begun. Here, the question is no longer whether communities will be forced to move, but how exactly to do so. Currently, 42 villages in Fiji have been earmarked for possible relocation in the next five to 10 years, due to the impacts of the climate crisis. Six have already moved. Each new cyclone or disaster carries the risk that even more towns will be added to the list.
Moving a village across Fiji’s lush, mountainous terrain is a surprisingly complex task. “We keep 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 out of a town and moving them higher up. I wish it was that simple.” He made a list of the things that need to be moved along with the houses: schools, health centers, roads, electricity, water, infrastructure, the village church. “And in case you were able to achieve even that, you have to move people’s cemeteries. Try to do it.” If anything, Prasad was underestimating the challenges, which are not just logistical, although that element is hard enough, but also financial, political, even spiritual.
The Standard Operating Procedures document is in the final stages of consultation and will soon go to Fiji’s Cabinet for approval. “No other country, to my knowledge, has advanced so much in its thinking about how to make planned relocation decisions at the national level,” says Erica Bower, an expert on planned relocations who has worked with the UN and the Fijian government. “These are questions that so many governments around the world will be asking in the next 10 years, 20 years, 50 years.”
Abandoned houses on the old site of the village of Vunidogoloa. Photography: Walter Gerard
1 The first transfer: 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 on a tour of the new and old places in the village, loves it.
Ramatu, 62, was the village chief in 2014, at the time of the transfer. Vunidogoloa is a two-hour drive from the island’s main town, Labasa, and when I visited recently, he showed me around the old town. This is where Ramatu was born, where he always imagined he would die. It is now a ghost town. About 20 abandoned houses still stand, the wind whistling through their open doors and broken shutters. Ceilings are falling, floorboards are missing, everything is covered. What would once have been a lush clearing of grass where people gathered to eat and drink is now a swamp.
Discussions about relocating Vunidogoloa began in earnest around 2004. Two years later, the community approached the provincial government and requested help with the relocation. It was the better part of a decade before the new site, about a mile further inland and higher up, was ready for them.
Sailosi Ramatu at the old Vunidogoloa village site. Photography: Walter Gerard
The transfer was a decision of last resort. The town had adapted until it could adapt no more. On the sandy beach at the old village site, Ramatu showed me concrete blocks sticking out of the sand: the footings of his old house. Over the decades, as the water advanced, his family had moved the house again and again. He pointed to the remains of a dike three or four meters out to sea. It was the second one built for the town, after waves and storms destroyed the first one. It also became useless.
The idea of relocating the village had been discussed since the 1950s, when sea levels began to rise, and so the community felt it had the blessing of past generations. Still, 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 foreigners to a foreign land. People were packing their bags, they were being loaded into a truck…they cried before they left the house, because it was the last time.”
detail of Fiji showing four villages/settlements threatened by climate change
The new Vunidogoloa consists of 30 pale green houses spread across an impossibly green hillside. In Sera Naidrua’s house on the day I visited, the walls were covered with colorful cloth tapestries and a cool breeze blew through the open windows and doors. She had placed a green gingham cloth on the floor, on which were placed plastic buckets with cutlery, and colored glass plates, which were ready for lunch: rourou (taro leaf cooked in coconut milk) and cassava . A ginger cat sat next to him.
As Naidrua, who is 74, poured iced tea into shiny plastic cups, she spoke emotionally of the old village. She remembered, as a child, picking the fruits of the dilo tree, which grew along the shore at the old site, and using them to play with balls. But ultimately, he said, “It was a good decision to move here.” Earlier, he said, “They feared for our lives because of the cyclones, the waves inundating the village.” Now, “We feel safer here.”
To move, a community ideally needs two things. “The people must have the land, and secondly, they must have the resource: wood, gravel, rocks, sand,” said Simione Botu, the current chief. “If not… trouble.” In these respects, at least, Vunidogoloa was lucky. Villagers did not have to negotiate with a neighboring clan or the government in order to transfer land. They already owned land, within mataqali (clan) boundaries, which was considered safe for the construction of a new village. The clan also owned forests that could provide wood for houses. So while the Fijian government funded a large part of the relocation and the International Labor Organization provided some funding to pay the workers for the construction, the people contributed much of the resources.
Still, mistakes were made. Talk to people working on Fiji’s relocation guidelines, and one particular omission comes up again and again. The houses on the new Vunidogoloa site were all built without kitchens. The government’s initial plan was for each house to have a separate outdoor kitchen, to be built during a second construction phase, once the main house structures were finished, but this never happened. Eventually, the villagers built their own kitchens, some using material salvaged from the kitchens of their houses in the old village.
Houses on the new site of Vunidogoloa. Photograph: Loren Elliott/Reuters
Makereta Waqavonovono of Climate Tok, an organization that works on climate crisis education with rural communities, said this failure points to something more fundamental than a lack of funding or an incomplete building project: the lack of consulting the whole community, rather than just a few male village leaders. “One of the most striking parts is that they forgot to put in kitchens,” he said when asked about the lessons learned from the Vunidogoloa move. “Now, what does it say? It means women weren’t involved.”
The new site has also brought new problems. It is near a highway, which allows villagers easy access to larger cities for health care and schooling, but the ease of travel has also meant the arrival of alcohol, in a village previously dry, and what Botu called “criminal behavior.” After the move, the village created a committee to monitor village bylaws, particularly around alcohol consumption, noise complaints and anti-social behaviour, problems Botu said they didn’t have before. The new location is inland, which makes fishing, part of everyday life and key to the villagers’ diet, more difficult. Many villagers, Naidrua said, still go down to the old site to fish two or three times a week.
Still, Naidrua said most people agree the benefits of moving outweigh the disadvantages. The new houses have septic tanks, solar panels and toilets. Each family has its own house, whereas in the old place, two or three families shared each dwelling. It’s much easier to grow food here, away from the swampy, saline soil. It is, for the most part, a success story, an example of a transfer well done.
Sera Naidrua, pictured at her home in the new village of Vunidogoloa. Photography: Walter Gerard
2 “Draft Zero”: how to start planning a move
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