The saltwater people of the Lau Lagoon on the northeastern tip of Malaita Island in the Solomon Islands have for hundreds of years created artificial islands on the reef by building coral rock walls that rise above sea level. The Lau have long had deep knowledge of their fishing grounds and have traditionally managed them by closing off areas to allow fish stocks to replenish.
But it has become more difficult to rely on that knowledge as the islands erode into the sea and become depopulated. A common understanding is that these changes are driven by climate change – a single external force against which the solwata pipol have little chance.
So, the lagoon dwellers are forced to adapt, even by leaving the lagoon altogether. They and other coastal people are becoming environmental refugees in their own country. And the reason, we’re told, is climate change.
Enter government officials and aid bureaucrats from the capital with their ‘adaptation assessments’ and ‘resilience projects’, with ‘community participation’. Media discourses – local and foreign – reproduce this development jargon without question, in ways that reinforce our worst collective fears of the climate crisis. Sinking islands in one part of the Solomons become a siren call of a greater global emergency.
It is this emergency that concentrates the minds of climate diplomats each year at United Nations conventions – last November in Sharm el-Sheikh and in Glasgow in 2021, known as COP26.
Pacific states have provided the world with some of the most compelling narratives around climate ‘security’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘justice’, drawing on long-cultivated coalitions with other small island states. Pacific activists have also promoted some of the most affective imagery to influence the decisionmakers of larger nations, some of whose metropoles grew rich off labour and resource exploitation during colonial and post-independence periods.
