Catalog

Fiji Islands
A Matter of Survival

In fragile island ecosystems, small changes can have long-term detrimental impacts on the environment

By Ian Gill (igill@adb.org)
Principal External Relations Specialist

SUVA, FIJI ISLANDS

Environmental issues in the Pacific are often a matter of survival. Some islands, for example, have already vanished under rising sea levels. Kiribati—where the highest point is 2 meters above sea level—could find itself partly under water within half a century.

Other islands are in danger of losing vital freshwater supplies that lie in “lenses,” which are like air pockets beneath atolls and are accessed by drill holes. These lenses are threatened with contamination from saltwater (if the sea rises above ground level) or, in the case of Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, by ill-placed septic tanks and pit latrines.

In close consultation with its Pacific developing member countries, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is finalizing a new Pacific Region Environmental Strategy, due to be published by the end of 2003. This new strategy will feed into the broader Pacific Regional Strategy 2005–2009, which is being prepared.

ADB’s Pacific developing member countries depend heavily—economically and culturally—on the environment, yet their fragile ecosystems and limited land and freshwater resources make them highly vulnerable. This situation is aggravated by rapid population growth, leading to increased resource use and pollution, and a vulnerability to natural disasters, including a possible rise in sea level as a result of global climate change.

National policies and programs that address these concerns vary widely. Substantial external assistance—particularly for strengthening environment agencies, combined with government and civil society initiatives—has not, unfortunately, been enough to reduce pressures on the Pacific environment.

The most urgent issues are threats to freshwater resources; degradation of marine and coastal environments; land and forest degradation; increasing waste and problems of urbanization; depletion of biological diversity; energy-related environmental concerns; adaptation to climate change, variability, and sea level rise; and weak environmental management capacities and governance.

As ADB cannot address all these issues, it will focus on areas of intervention that draw on its strengths. As a multilateral lending institution working with international organizations, governments, and a range of stakeholders, these strengths lie in influencing regional and national policy, encouraging reform, and strengthening institutions.

The environmental strategy will include interventions at local, subnational, national/sectoral, and regional levels, and work through community-based organizations and nongovernment organizations to design and implement projects that can be replicated at higher levels. At the subnational level, ADB will prioritize interventions in agriculture, forestry, and energy supply, and minimize their impacts on subnational ecosystems.

“The subnational level is the most crucial point of intervention, with watersheds, islands, urban areas and their hinterlands, provinces or states, the planning units of choice. There is often strong community ownership at this level and ecosystems are more easily understood. The scale is also appropriate to funding constraints, ” says Daniele Ponzi, ADB Senior Economist (Environment), Pacific Operations Division.

“In countries like Kiribati, for example, that are vulnerable to coastal erosion, it is clearly important to work at the subnational or project level. This means making sure that roads and other infrastructure projects or houses are not built too near the water or below sea level.”

ADB is progressively using this new strategy to mainstream environmental considerations into development plans supported by ADB, and will extend this approach to all Pacific developing member countries over the next 2 years.

Find out more about ADB's activities in the Pacific

ADB and Fiji Islands

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