From her wooden veranda on Nacula island in Fiji’s remote Yasawa group, Lavenia Naivalu remembers reefs so healthy that her grandfather could walk to the shore and come back with fish. Not any more. “The reefs that the older generation of men spearfished in, no longer provide what they once did,” says the 44-year-old. Young people now have to travel further out to sea to feed their families.
She looks out on a white sandy beach that rising seas are eating away, and watches her three children “feel the brunt of changes in the climate.” Naivalu is an Indigenous representative at the Pacific meeting Fiji hosts next week, ahead of the COP31 climate summit, and she means to be heard.
A deal born of a standoff
Turkey and Australia agreed last year that the Pacific would host preparatory meetings before COP31, a compromise that settled a dispute over where the 2026 summit would be held. The summit itself takes place in the Turkish Mediterranean resort of Antalya in November. Australia chairs the negotiations.
The region will be in the spotlight as never before. Pacific Islands account for just 0.02% of global emissions, the United Nations says, yet they are disproportionately hit by the climate crisis.
“We want to know is action”
Naivalu is a veteran of earlier COP summits and a trailblazer at home. She was Fiji’s first female mata ni tikina, or district representative, overseeing seven village chiefs in a traditionally male system, and the first Indigenous member picked for Fiji’s tourism board. Bringing the talks to the Pacific matters, she told the Guardian, but the vocabulary does not. “We talk about climate change, climate finance, about adaptation and mitigation,” she said. “But my people in Nacula don’t know what climate finance is; what we want to know is action.”
She dislikes being spoken for. “I don’t attend Cop to worry about texts and brackets; I attend Cop to forge partnerships with organisations that I believe can help the people of Nacula.”
Sivendra Michael, Fiji’s permanent secretary for environment and climate change, said Naivalu “closes the distance between negotiating room and the reef.” Fiji will argue at COP31 for direct access to finance, for adaptation delivered at community level, and for Indigenous knowledge to be treated as evidence rather than decoration, he said.
Life on Nacula
Water sources that once sustained the village are drying up, Naivalu said, while seawater increasingly threatens the hand-dug wells. Families now store drinking water for dry periods, and women preserve food. Village chief Ratu Manasa Naikasowalo credits her with bringing practical projects home: food security, salt making, coral planting and food-preservation programmes.
In Fiji she will press for Indigenous voices as leaders negotiate climate finance, adaptation, loss and damage, and keeping warming within 1.5C.
