Fiji village toughs it out despite climate change

Transcript

A researcher who's just been in Fiji says communities can adapt and relocation is not necessarily the answer to dealing with climate change.

Jeffrey Smith has spent several weeks in the northwest of the main island Viti levu as part of a project studying communities living in flood-prone river basins in Fiji and Cambodia.

The three year study which is based at Auckland University looks at how people are responding to the increased flooding resulting from climate change and other risk factors.

Mr Smith told Sally Round the people in Votua village in Ba are becoming more resilient.

JEFFREY SMITH: In this community ... it's obviously a large water catchment of about two or 300 square kilometres with one large river running through the centre. What happens during cyclones, there's obviously heavy rain, so flooding breaks the banks of the river. Also the river itself is very low-lying, so it's tidal, so if there's maximum tides which people are saying are rising, also due to climate change, then the two compound together and it results in serious flooding.

SALLY ROUND: So this village of about 650 people, what are the particular effects for them over this decade of flooding that they've had, what have they had to deal with?

JS: Votua village which is the one you're referring to, has been affected by may be four serious floods in the last decade or so. The biggest concern for people when the flood is coming is just damage to all of their property, so the flooding completely saturates their house and all its contents. So that's one issue but then one or two weeks after the flooding there's no water supply, there's no power, so there's issues with getting clean water. There's disease outbreaks afterwards especially skin infections and stomach illness. Another big problem is that the flooding destroys their main food source which is the cassava, it just causes all the vegetables to rot, as well as obviously their livestock has been washed away in the past.

SR: Has this led to people leaving the village?

JS: Yes, the government has specifically asked the population of Votua to actually relocate entirely to another village in a higher area. The younger generation especially some of the younger families have moved but generally speaking the village leaders and the older generation prefer to stay. They're obviously aware as well it's not as simple as packing up and leaving because their livelihood comes from the ocean, from the river. They depend on that for food and for income. So the government can say, 'hey, everyone should up and move, we can build them houses', but really the issues of finding employment and opportunity for finding food is a challenge. At the moment they're most severely affected by drought, the most severe drought that they've had since the late 1980s so it's kind of going from one extreme to the other.

SR: And that would have thrown up a whole lot of different challenges then?

JS: Yeh, mainly with crops. When asked what affects them most, what are they most concerned with, droughts, hurricanes or floods, they all unanimously say that the flooding is the biggest challenge. The drought they can get through. It just means they have less crops.

SR: What did you learn from the stay with the villagers?

JS: The main question we were concerned with is how are they adapting and becoming more resilient to the flooding. So we asked them, are they adapting in terms of houses, how are they adjusting in the way they build. How are they adapting with their crops, how are they finding water when there's no water supply after the flood. The most common pattern we're observing is that people are tending now to build double storey houses. In fact in the last three or four years in Votua village, there's five or six double storey houses have been constructed and when the flood came, the last flood, people used these double storey houses for refuge as well as the school.

SR: And how are they coping with food security?

JS: At this stage they've been dependent on assistance from outside. The government is quite effective in immediately providing food, as well as organisations like the Red Cross and faith-based organisations have really been quite responsive in the last floods so they're just getting things like rice and flour and for six to even nine months after the flood until the crops fully recover they're dependent upon that assistance.

SR: They're pretty adamant that they don't want to relocate then?

JS: Yeh, that's right, for reasons of being tied to their land. They all referred to their grandfathers, their forefathers being there. They want to stay but also the complexity of having to find jobs and a new way of life somewhere else.

SR: So has this thrown light on your project, in terms of the aims of the project?

JS: I think it's definitely made clear that they are adapting, they are in certain ways becoming more resilient and that knowledge, that experience can be useful for other communities so governments and organisations can draw on in other contexts and assisting other communities to adapt.

SR: Not expecting people to move for instance?

JS: Yeh exactly. I think something that the local people said is 'hey instead of telling us to move we want more education, we want more assistance from outside so that we can be more prepared to deal with flooding ourselves, in our given context'.