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Most research on climate change in South Pacific island communities has privileged people’s observations of physical environmental change with less attention paid to how people interpret the causes of these changes. Increasingly, more studies are focusing on how communities are receiving messages about environmental degradation, and from whom they are receiving them. This case study draws upon ethnographic research conducted in November 2015 in Narikoso on Ono Island in Fiji’s Kadavu Group. This village was in the process of relocating inland as a response to shoreline erosion and severe coastal flooding. By employing data drawn from interviews with government actors, religious leaders, and residents of Narikoso village along with fieldnotes from participant observation, this paper examines how village residents interpreted coastal flooding and shoreline erosion according to the biblical story of Noah’s Ark alongside a secular narrative of climate change. I conclude by showing the unique challenges these worldviews had on the community’s decision to relocate. © 2020 The University of Western Australia.
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How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change?Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld,edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges.People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change.Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.
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As the impacts of climate change intensify, potential relocation is becoming more of a reality for coastal communities throughout the world. This is furthering the demand for the implementation of governance relocation frameworks. In order to stay true to the principles of environmental justice while at the same time ensuring an effective policy that meets the needs and wants of affected communities, an adaptive relocation framework requires collaboration between state and non-state actors. It is thus important to pay attention to how non-state actors are incorporated into public participatory climate change adaptation efforts. In order to affectively address previous limitations of public participation, stakeholders must pay attention to already existing power systems. Through a case study approach of a village relocation project in Fiji, I examine the role of power in a climate change adaptation plan that involved the community of Vunidogoloa, local government, and national government stakeholders. I employ Steven Lukes’s three-dimensional framework of power to the case of Vunidogoloa, a Fijian village that relocated inland due to coastal erosion and shoreline flooding, to illustrate how the political arrangement of participation reinforced existing hierarchies between the village and the government.
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