Guiding our responses to climate change by what people value: Insights from Fiji

Abstract

Pacific Island countries are experiencing and responding to significant and multiple climate change impacts. However, very few studies have examined how these climate change impacts affect what people value and how this then affects how people respond to these impacts. This study explores what people value and how climate change affects these values, and identifies values-based ways of addressing loss and damage. We draw on in-depth interviews with 27 people across three study sites in Fiji: Togoru settlement, Sese village, and Vunisavisavi village. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analysed using SPSS and NVivo. The most highly ranked values were spirituality and family, illustrating the foundation of the Fijian way of life, although the relative importance of values can change and trade-offs between values were emerging for different community groupings in the face of risk. The most common climatic stressors across the three study sites included sea-level rise, coastal erosion, tidal inundation, and salt-water intrusion. Adaptation measures largely proved inadequate, resulting in intolerable climate change impacts. Intolerable climatic risks were affecting people’s values of family, spirituality, a sense of place, and agency, followed closely by wellbeing, culture, connection to land and sea, future generations, and ways of being. Six locally identified responses to protect values and respond to loss and damage were identified, including: investing in resilient infrastructure to disaster-proof communities; restoring the socio-ecological system; promoting and protecting culture and knowledge; providing holistic wellbeing support; protecting sacred places; and enabling subsistence livelihoods to flourish.