40 Communities Await Relocation

Three communities in the country have been moved and about 40 are waiting to be relocated because of the impacts of climate change.

Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama made the comment at the Carbon Market Institute’s Australian Emission Reduction Summit in Melbourne, Australia, yesterday.

“The decision to relocate a Fijian community may seem like an easy one, but abandoning your home isn’t some cold and calculated business decision - for those affected it’s a deeply emotional loss,” he said.

“An elderly Fijian widow now wakes up in the morning to find the ocean at her doorstep, slowly wearing away a home she and her family have known for generations.

“A young Fijian sugarcane farmer who learned to toil the ground from his father and his father before him now watches helplessly as the fields that fuel his livelihood become too salty for crops to grow.

“And an entire coastal village mourns as the graves of their ancestors are forever inundated and washed away, robbing them of the deep and spiritual connection to their land.

“They have no choice - it is a matter of survival.”

Mr Bainimarama said relocation was enormously complex, saying that new resources and space must be allocated, new forms of livelihood must be identified and cultivated.

“That is why Fiji has developed the world’s first relocation guidelines and is in the process of establishing a Relocation Trust Fund dedicated to this purpose,” he said.

“Building greater resilience to climate impacts, including relocating vulnerable communities, is obviously a major priority.

“But if that’s where we focus all our energy, we’ll be faced with a climate catastrophe that no nation can navigate. We need to address the root of the problem by urgently modernising and decarbonising our economies and societies.”

Edited by Percy Kean

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