More at risk of losing homes as climate change outpaces response, Fiji warns

By Megan Rowling

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Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama told an online event - to mark five years since global agreements to tackle climate change and disasters were adopted in 2015 - that the threat of worsening storms and rising seas had become more “existential” by the day.

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Since 2016, his small island nation in the Pacific had experienced 12 cyclones, three of them top-strength, while seas were creeping higher, rivers flooding more often and droughts becoming longer.

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The impacts of a warming planet are putting more Fijians at risk of displacement from climate-linked threats, Bainimarama said. The government has identified at least 43 communities that would need to be relocated to higher ground.

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Other vulnerable communities were finding ways to stay put in their homes through things like building sea walls, while governments were now planning better for disasters and building back stronger homes and communities afterwards, he noted.

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