How to move a country: Fiji’s radical plan to escape rising sea levels

What Fiji is attempting to do is unprecedented. For years, politicians and scientists have been talking about the prospect of climate migration. In Fiji, and in much of the Pacific, this migration has already begun. Here, the question is no longer if communities will be forced to move, but how exactly to do it. 

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At present, 42 Fijian villages have been earmarked for potential relocation in the next five to 10 years, owing to the impacts of climate crisis. Six have already been moved. Every new cyclone or disaster brings with it the risk of yet more villages being added to the list.

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International funding, such as via the Green Climate Fund, is slim. “If you look at the amount of funding that’s being made available for [climate] adaptation,” Fiji’s climate change minister Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum said, “the Pacific’s allocation is a sliver of a sliver.” But the need for this funding is growing. 

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For many Pacific people, burial sites remain the biggest obstacle to relocation. The hardest people to move are the dead. When relocating, villagers face a choice of either leaving behind the bones of ancestors, or exhuming them and taking them to the new site. Either choice is deeply traumatic.