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Lomawai is a village in the Western Division of Fiji that is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Donors making a difference: weaving traditional and modern innovations to build climate-resilience in Fiji
Under the dappled light of swaying palms, the sound of trickling water echoes through the quiet village of Lomawai as Manoa and members of the community, including children, fill up their weekly water rations into recycled bottles and containers.
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Manoa sitting on his boat ready to fish for his family. Manoa’s fresh bag of cassava to sustain him and his family for a few days.
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Water is scarce and community members including children fill containers and bottles up weekly to have access to water.
Opening once a week, a borehole fills tanks around the village so that people can access water to drink, cook and clean. But water is scarce.
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Community members preparing fish caught locally for a communal lunch.
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Community members preparing fish caught locally for a communal lunch.
Rising tides threaten more than just the coastline in Fiji and other Pacific island-nations – climate change endangers people’s health, livelihoods and the community’s culture.
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Homes in the Fijian village, Lomawai, are highly vulnerable to sea level rise and other climate change impacts.
Manoa lives off the land and ocean – growing cassava and fishing from the sea to sustain his family. Floods not only enter and compromise homes but also affect crop harvests leading to food security issues. The flow-on effect is financial – affecting communities’ ability to sell and meet basic needs – ultimately impacting livelihoods.
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Manoa’s boat and cassava farm sustain his family and the wider Lomawai community.
But a transformative movement is taking root.
Thanks to the support from the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), over 60 families – some having lived there for many generations – are being equipped with the knowledge to help protect them against the mounting health risks of climate change.
The WHO-supported Strengthening Health Adaptation Project: Responding to Climate Change in Fiji (SHAPE Project), goes beyond theory – incorporating inclusive dialogue and community-led solutions for drought, sea level rise, cyclones and flooding – to ensure that participants emerge not only informed, but empowered to drive change. The KOICA SHAPE Project not only protects lives, but by extension protects people’s way of life – their traditions and culture.
A series of participatory training sessions have energised the community, blending science with lived experience, whilst weaving in traditional practices and daily routines.
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Beyond acquired knowledge about how rising temperatures intensify vector-borne diseases like dengue, how floods contaminate water, and how shifting weather patterns impact food security – importantly they are also learning how to adapt and respond.
The communities have pinpointed dengue and diarrhoea as priority health issues.
One approach they will begin implementing is covering stagnant water and purging mosquito breeding grounds during weekly community clean-ups to reduce dengue prevalence.
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Uncovered stagnant water is a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
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It takes a village – multigenerational households in Fiji and across the Pacific is common.
But the main issue of water scarcity is the other culprit behind diarrhoea. Climate change worsens water insecurity by affecting the availability, quantity and quality of various water sources.
Beyond health, sea level rise is also affecting salt production, a challenge that has been around since before Manoa’s generation.
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Climate change threatens Lomawai’s salt production, which uses a traditional approach of boiling off sea water collected from a hand-dug well.
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Climate change threatens Lomawai’s salt production, which uses a traditional approach of boiling off sea water collected from a hand-dug well.
For the next step of the project, the collective decision of the community is to focus on interventions that improve water security so that they can resourcefully adapt to climate change. This means installing a new water pump to use with the borehole, to have ready access to water.
This initiative is part of broader WHO efforts to embed participatory approaches from the ground-up into public health responses. This reflects a global shift toward local solutions – where knowledge is not transmitted but transformed into action.
A take-home message from one of the participants, Annie Radiva, is that “we have to prepare ourselves and be fully prepared for the individual and village effects of climate change.”
Continuing to share, “I hope that other villages and Pacific communities get to experience the training and develop their knowledge on climate change, so they too have a chance to make change and adapt for the future.”
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As the tide comes in and the sun sets, change arrives in the voices of people who have absorbed knowledge to heal, lead and rise to the challenge of adapting to climate change - passing both traditional wisdom and climate science to the next generation.
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Children are the future of sustaining the way of life in Lomawai. Wisdom from tradition and climate change adaptation knowledge can now be passed on from generation to generation.
This community engagement project is one of four being implemented as part of the KOICA SHAPE Project, a US$ 5.5 million project to transform lives in Fiji.