In-Depth

Land, Home, Village, Self

The interwoven effort to save reefs, corals, and a modern but traditional way of life

A woman in a yellow skirt sits and smiles at camera

Talei Silibaravi talks with WWF staff about protecting her community’s way of life.

“Before I knew how to read or write,” says Talei Silibaravi, her brown eyes scanning the placid sea before her, “I spent my days in the mangroves.”

This sun-soaked afternoon, Silibaravi is sitting under the shelter of a sprawling banyan tree, behind a veil of teal fishing nets hung up to dry. The daughter of a clan chief and a schoolteacher, she grew up here, on the small reef- and mangrove-fringed island of Kavewa, three miles from the “big land” of Vanua Levu, one of Fiji’s two main islands.

Kavewa was her world. In shallow water as warm as her skin, she climbed among the mangroves’ tangled roots, while all around her a veritable menagerie of reef sharks, mud crabs, and songbirds swam, scuttled, and swooped.

Her days were measured by the ebb and flow of the tides. In the flats in front of Kavewa village, she foraged wispy golden seaweed, called lumi, and picked tiny translucent green sea grapes, nama, that exploded with brine between her teeth. Older siblings and cousins speared iridescent fish and caught spiny lobsters as long as her arm.

It was here that Silibaravi learned about her vanua, a word that defies easy translation but speaks to a larger sense of land, and village, and home. Vanua is also the people who own the land and the beliefs and customs and values of the people. Vanua is an extension of self.

“The ocean is our identity,” she says. “Without it, there is no us.”

Seini Tilalila, from Vatutavui, displays freshly collected sea grapes.

I can say that the ocean and the reef are my father and my mother because whenever I need food, I go to the reef,” says Kavewa village headman Wate Saviri. “Whenever I need money, I go to the reef. The reef and the ocean are part of my family.”

The portion of the Great Sea Reef at Kavewa’s doorstep is known locally as Cakaulevu, “the big reef,” or Bainivualiku, “protector of the North,” and it spans close to 150 miles. The full reef unfurls for nearly 280 miles along Fiji’s northwestern edge; it is the third-largest barrier reef system in the world, after Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and Central America’s Mesoamerican Reef.

Yadua Island showcases Fiji’s stunning interactions between land and sea.

A focus of WWF-Pacific’s work in the Western Pacific, this massive and complex undersea ecosystem is Fiji’s sea basket and accounts for up to 80% of domestic fisheries. It is especially important to Fijian coastal communities, directly sustaining the lives and livelihoods of as many as 70,000 people. What they don’t consume, they often sell to pay for children’s education and for religious and customary obligations like those related to weddings and funerals. The reef, says Unaisi Malani, Great Sea Reef program manager for WWF-Pacific, “has been a lifeline for these communities for generations.”

It is also exceptionally biodiverse. A 2019 ecological survey supported by WWF documented more than three-quarters of known coral species globally, as well as over half of recorded marine fish species and five of seven turtle species. Yet it remains poorly studied and undervalued.

“The ocean is our identity. Without it, there is no us. ”

Talei Silibaravi
Community advocate

At the same time, the Great Sea Reef increasingly suffers from a host of environmental threats, including overfishing, bycatch of turtles and reef sharks, siltation from land development and degradation, and chemical runoff and pollutants from harmful farming practices and landfills. Compounding the impact of these localized threats is climate change.

Warmer temperatures are degrading both the reef and fisheries, threatening food security and the reef’s ability to act as a protector against storm surges, says Pablo Obregon, director of Western Pacific Seascapes on the WWF-US Oceans team.

Still, Obregon says, Fiji is “very fortunate, in that it’s been found to have some of the most climate resilient reefs in the world.” A 2018 analysis identified a few places where coral reefs have a higher chance of surviving climate change (often areas with cool ocean currents or “upwellings”); nearly 70% of these reefs are found in just seven countries, including Fiji.

If Fijians can address localized threats, Obregon says, the Great Sea Reef—and the communities that depend on it—stand a fighting chance. And Fiji’s resilient and well-connected coral reefs could help repopulate other degraded reef areas in the future.

“If there’s anywhere local action can make a difference,” Obregon says, “it’s here.”

Man holds up his catch for the day

Tevita Ratoto returns from a successful fishing trip to the Great Sea Reef.

Global concerns seem far from mind as one morning in mid-May Talei Silibaravi joins Akosita Kaususu and Salanieta Lutumaitoga to harvest voivoi, the long, thin, fibrous leaves of pandanus trees.

With machetes, they slice the leaves from the trunks, then sit cross-legged in the shade, chatting as they strip away the midribs, beginning the long process of drying, softening, cutting, and weaving the leaves into the traditional mats found in nearly every home in Fiji. Used indoors and out for sleeping, socializing, and ceremonies, pandanus mats are often given as gifts at weddings and funerals. In fact, when Queen Elizabeth II visited Fiji in the 1950s, a procession of Fijian women presented her with more than a dozen mats. As the women work, they’re serenaded by some young children nearby singing an English-language pop song.

Like many of Kavewa’s kids, Silibaravi’s 6-year-old daughter, Estella, is away at boarding school on a nearby island for the week. English is the language of instruction, but Silibaravi says Estella prefers the local Indigenous dialect. Fiercely proud of her Indigenous Fijian, or iTaukei, heritage, the girl sometimes lectures her mother for failing to conform to tradition—like wearing her hair “wild” instead of in the more sculpted buiniga style that is favored by other village women as a symbol of iTaukei pride.

After leaving the pandanus leaves to dry in a limestone rock shelter near the sea, Kaususu and Lutumaitoga begin work on a new mat as Silibaravi looks on. The women often work side by side, each starting a section, then joining them together. Village headman Saviri watches, gently teasing Silibaravi that she doesn’t know how to make a mat. She laughs. She could weave from childhood, but her life’s path diverged from that of the other women. After high school, she earned a degree in environmental management at the University of the South Pacific and worked overseas before returning to Kavewa in her early twenties.

Silibaravi isn’t the only person her age to have left the island. Today, young adults often leave their villages to pursue higher education or for jobs, whether overseas or in Fiji’s thriving tourism sector—and many never move back home.

“The traditional knowledge, it’s eroding,” Silibaravi says. “As an Indigenous person, as someone who is a guardian of the Great Sea Reef, all this knowledge was passed to us by our forefathers—like how we should look after it, like knowing not to harvest small fish,” she says. But now, she says, “kids learn a lot about other cultures but little about ‘who we are.’”

Silibaravi admits it wasn’t until she went away that she came to truly value and understand her vanua—in every sense of the word. It was at university, for example, that she learned about the ecological importance of the mangroves where she had spent her childhood. Mangroves are nurseries for marine life: “a hospital for marine organisms,” she says. Learning the wider importance of something so familiar was a revelation.

It’s that kind of understanding and appreciation of their place and themselves she hopes to spark in other members of her community. “I want them to realize what they are blessed with,” she says.

Akosita Kaususu (left) and Salanieta Lutumaitoga pose in front of drying pandanus leaves, which will be woven into traditional Fijian mats.

Helping villages like Kavewa realize what they’re blessed with—and protect it by addressing localized threats—is critical to WWF’s community-led approach to natural resource management along the Great Sea Reef and throughout the Pacific.

“These communities have a vast knowledge, things we don’t learn in classrooms,” says Apolosa Robaigau, a community development officer with WWF-Pacific. “Working with them, learning from them,” he says, “is the best experience.”

Indigenous peoples have custodial ownership of most land in Fiji and control customary fishing areas known as qoliqoli. Robaigau helps communities interpret the issues they face and create management plans for their lands and waters that marry traditional knowledge, often passed down orally, with scientific data, like that gained through biological surveys.

WWF acts as a convener, says WWF’s Malani, “bringing together communities and government stakeholders in a participatory process to put together district-wide management plans.” The communities drive the priorities, and the plans allow decision-makers at community and national levels to arrive at informed choices about natural resource management.

WWF initiated this consultative process in the district of Nadogo, which includes Kavewa and nine other villages, in 2018. In late 2022 district representatives unveiled a fisheries management plan that includes marine protected areas, new fishing regulations in line with national policies, and proposed mangrove restoration areas.

Then in 2023, the district took the historic step of declaring two uninhabited islands in its qoliqoli, Katawaqa and Nukuvadra, as community protected areas, safeguarding intact mangroves and Fiji’s largest turtle nesting site.

The people of Kavewa have worked with WWF on turtle conservation and research for more than two decades. But whereas once decisions were made largely by traditional, male leaders, now women and young people increasingly have a say in determining community priorities. And the inclusivity of the process is no accident: WWF facilitates community workshops and intergenerational discussions as part of a concerted effort to engage marginalized groups like women and young people in the process.

The current work is different, says Saviri, who in addition to being headman of Kavewa also serves as district representative for Nadogo. For example, he says, “It’s actually a first for me and my team to . . . learn from our women the different species and fishes that are found in these areas.”

A mix of hard and soft corals combine to create a rich marine environment around Fiji’s Yasawa Islands.

The next morning, three young men, Emosi Raitala, Peni Vusoni—both 17 years old—and Apisalome Vakabula—26—wrap sulas around their waists and walk toward a village elder seated under the banyan tree. Vakabula carries an offering wrapped in newspaper and tied with green plastic raffia—a bundle of dried kava root, the source of the slightly sedative drink that is as central to Fijian ceremonies and social gatherings as are pandanus mats.

The young men are learning to perform the traditional sevusevu protocol, Vakabula explains: “If we go to someplace where we are new, then we do the sevusevu to go into the vanua. You explain why you came, what you want to do.” With the elder’s permission to enter comes a blessing so “nothing [bad] will happen,” Vakabula says.

The idea for this “cultural training” and others like it, now a staple of Kavewa’s youth group, struck Silibaravi like divine inspiration. On Monday evenings, following the community’s usual youth church program, she thought, “How about we learn something—after we do the devotion, we do something about ourselves? Why don’t we just learn about us?”

Silibaravi has no shortage of ideas about how to advance both community development and Indigenous-led conservation on Kavewa. When COVID-19 kept village women from selling seafood at the market, she ran a Facebook page so they could barter lumi and mussels for staples like flour and sugar. In 2021 she led Kavewa children to win a video competition about climate change sponsored by the Australian National University, and she mobilized the village women’s group to get a grant for biogas digesters that turn kitchen scraps into cooking gas.

In September 2023, she represented that women’s group at a symposium on sustainable development in Suva, Fiji’s capital. Later that year, she took to the world stage. With WWF’s help, she represented Fiji—specifically the youth and women of Kavewa—at the international climate summit in Dubai, COP28. There, she participated in a panel discussion titled “We Will Do This: Indigenous People Leading Climate Resilience and Nature Preservation.”

“It was an eye-opening experience,” she says, that reaffirmed the importance both of international advocacy and local, day-to-day progress. “You can’t go around expecting people to help you if you don’t help yourself first,” Silibaravi says, “You have to start at home.”

A dense mangrove forest fringes Fiji’s Wainikoro River.

Artisanal fish at the market in Tavua.

“These communities have a vast knowledge, things we don’t learn in classrooms. Working with them, learning from them, is the best experience.”

Apolosa Robaigau
WWF-Pacific community development officer

Back on Kavewa one afternoon, the three young men from the cultural training head out in a fiberglass boat to spear reef fish. Raitala seems restless. He graduated from a high school on Vanua Levu last year and says he misses school, misses his friends there. As the boat motors toward a small limestone island, he begins singing quietly in Fijian. It’s a love song, about a boy and a girl. The young men clean snorkel masks with crushed hibiscus leaves, then slip over the sides of the boat, Raitala clutching a homemade metal spear. Soon they return with four surgeonfish, triumphant.

Tomorrow, Silibaravi will go to the big island to attend to some administrative matters for the youth group, and in a few weeks, she’ll participate in a summit hosted by WWF that aims to empower young leaders to drive conservation and community development.

But when her daughter returns to Kavewa on Friday afternoons, she’ll be waiting. Perhaps they’ll forage together in the tidal flats. “I usually take her out to collect mussels, and I’ve tried to explain—at her level—their different roles and gifts,” Silibaravi says. “Hopefully, one day, we may all know the role they play in our marine ecosystem.”

For now, Silibaravi says she plans to continue living on the island, giving her daughter a childhood remarkably like her own and helping the women and young people of Kavewa “recognize what they’re capable of.” She says she wants them all “to reach their full potential—not just as people, but as a community.”

“We can do so much together,” she says. “That’s the reason why I’m here.”

Protecting and Restoring Fiji’s Mangroves

A man stands next to a small patch of mangroves

Emosi Ravato, deputy chief of Vuaki Village, with a mangrove planted by the community.

In July 2023, traditional owners in the district of Nadogo, which means “the mangrove” in Fijian, took the historic step of declaring two mangrove-covered islands as community marine protected areas. The designation, spearheaded by traditional leaders and facilitated by WWF with the support of the Fijian government and the Bezos Earth Fund, permanently protects more than 16 acres of mangroves and signals a growing understanding of their importance.

Mangroves are vital to coastal communities, serving as nurseries for fish and sources of traditional medicine. They also protect against storm surges and coastal erosion by trapping sedimentation. “The ecological functions of these systems are so very important,” says Unaisi Malani, Great Sea Reef program manager for WWF-Pacific. These gnarled and twisty forests found on the fringes of land and sea also play an outsize role in storing carbon—up to 10 times more than a landlocked forest of the same size. But globally, more than half the world’s mangroves are under threat.

WWF supports communities along the Great Sea Reef in protecting standing mangroves and restoring these “blue forests” in places where they belong. In parallel, passage of a pending federal regulation would establish mangrove protected areas and guide management and conservation nationwide.

And on a global scale, WWF and partners like the Bezos Earth Fund are harnessing the power of natural systems, including mangroves, as innovative solutions to the climate crisis.

Mangroves are one of nature’s most powerful defenses against the climate crisis, safeguarding vast carbon reserves and protecting the livelihoods of millions. On Kavewa Island and in communities worldwide, our partnership with WWF is driving the restoration of 1 million hectares of mangroves, protecting coastal communities and building resilience where it’s needed most,” says Dr. Cristián Samper at the Bezos Earth Fund.

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