FIJI (Common wealth Union)_In Fiji, a special government group has been attempting to figure out how to advance the country for the past four years. Its plan consists of 130 pages of dense text intermingled with sophisticated spider graphs and precise timelines. The document’s title is boring – Standard Operating Procedures for Planned Relocations – but it is the most comprehensive plan yet produced to address one of the most pressing implications of the climate crisis: how to transfer communities whose houses will soon be, or are already, underwater. The challenge is enormous. Fiji has over 300 islands with a population of little under 1 million people. It is located in the south Pacific, 1,800 miles east of Australia.
Fiji, like the rest of the Pacific, is extremely vulnerable to the effects of the climate catastrophe. Surface temperatures and ocean heat are rising three times faster in the south-west Pacific than the world average. Severe cyclones lash the region on a regular basis. Cyclone Winston slammed Fiji in 2016, killing 44 people and costing $1.4 billion in damage, or one-third of Fiji’s GDP. Fiji has been affected by six more cyclones since then. The Pacific region is home to five of the fifteen countries most vulnerable to weather-related catastrophes. Fiji is ranked 14th.
Fiji is attempting something unusual. For years, politicians and scientists have discussed the possibility of climate migration. This migration has already begun in Fiji and much of the Pacific. The question is no longer if communities will be compelled to relocate, but rather how they will do it. Due to the effects of the climate crisis, 42 Fijian communities have been identified for potential relocation within the next five to ten years. Six people have already been relocated. Every new hurricane or disaster increases the likelihood of more communities being added to the list. Moving a village across Fiji’s beautiful, hilly terrain is an incredible feat.
“We keep trying to explain this,” Fiji’s UN ambassador Satyendra Prasad told the Guardian last year. “It is not simply removing 30 or 40 houses from a hamlet and relocating them farther upfield. I wish it were that easy.” He ran off a list of items that must be relocated alongside the homes: schools, health centres, roads, electricity, water, infrastructure, and the village church. “And even if you are successful, you must transfer people’s burial grounds.”
