Sustaining youth projects of the Duavata Conservation Leadership Program
By Lara Bourke, Sara Carlson, Matthew Norman and Richard Markham
During July 2021, groups of young people from five communities on the Macuata coast of Vanua Levu participated in the first phase of the Duavata Conservation Leadership Programme (DCLP), with funding from the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Wellington. During the first three months of 2022, a grant from the British High Commission in Suva (supplementing funds remaining from the earlier German Embassy support) has allowed Duavata to develop a second phase of the Programme. This has involved two additional communities in Vanua Levu, Vusaratu and Raviravi, joining the programme, the extension of the model to include young people in Viti Levu, and the follow-up of the first-phase projects.
The concept for the Conservation Leadership Programme is simple but compelling. Businesses that are members of the Duavata Sustainable Tourism Collective are committed to offering eco-tourism experiences that emphasize the value of Fiji’s unique culture and natural environment – and have the knowledge of local biodiversity and ecological processes to interpret these connections for a variety of participants. During the hiatus in international tourism, associated with the Covid-19 restrictions, the support of donors allowed us to re-deploy these resources to offer similar experiences to young people from local communities – not just to give them an interesting day out but, more importantly, to inspire and empower them to tackle natural resource management challenges in their own surroundings.
The programme built on the foundation of long-standing relationships established by Nukubati Island Resort with neighbouring communities along the north coast of Vanua Levu. The Nukubati team were already committed to the principle that tourism should bring broad-based benefits to the communities that host Fiji’s tourist investments. The resort and these communities had been hit hard by devastating Tropical Cyclone Yasa, in December 2020, but their bonds had been further strengthened by the shared effort of reconstruction. And the shared trauma of TC Yasa helped to provide the communities with the motivation, indeed determination, to reduce their vulnerability and increase their resilience in the face of climate change and extreme weather events.
The story of the experiences provided by the Duavata Conservation Leadership Programme and the first round of projects has already been documented elsewhere. The second phase of the Programme allowed a combined team from Nukubati, KokoMana and NatureFiji/MareqetiViti to follow up on the first-phase projects with communities on the Macuata coast, assessing progress and exploring how any difficulties can be tackled.
As in any endeavour involving the complex relationships between people and their fragile natural environment, there have been plenty of setbacks. One community explained how cattle belonging to someone not involved in the project had escaped, trampling and browsing on the newly planted trees. Several communities expressed their regret (and sometimes dismay) at how fire and drought had decimated the tree seedlings. Most had suffered from the encroachment of aggressive weeds – most of them invasive species.
All of these reverses have, however, provided learnings that will strengthen the Programme and its partnerships going forward. In future all plantings and re-plantings will be done at the beginning of the wet season, when natural rainfall will help the trees to establish and reduce the likelihood of damage by fire. Future reforestation efforts will emphasize the use of cuttings of ‘multi-purpose’ trees, such as Gliricidia (known to Fijians as vaivai), to ‘capture’ the site, provide shade, suppress weeds and help to enrich the soil – in general, to provide a more favourable environment for the establishment of the slower growing but ultimately more resilient native hardwood trees. The Programme already seeks to be inclusive and has specifically sought to bring the community elders on-side, to support the initiatives of the young people; however, the incident of the stray cows (and some incidents of perhaps-intentional burning) emphasized how important it is that everyone needs to be involved, at some level, in natural resource management initiatives. Above all, these experiences underline the value of the continuing relationships between the communities and the Duavata partners – and the support and encouragement that these partnerships provide.
Along with the setbacks, there was also plenty of good news that came to light. At one community, part of the planting was along a watercourse, where residual soil moisture helped the trees to establish and grow away strongly, despite the dry season; this will provide the core for a wider planting on the adjacent sloping lands. And, best of all, none of the communities were ready to abandon their projects. Despite the reverses (or perhaps even motivated by them) all the groups wanted to rebuild, replant and go ahead with their nature-based projects, in search of a more resilient future.
The ideas for projects that arose from the second round of the Conservation Leadership Programme also emphasized the value of building on established relationships. At Vusaratu, Ocean Ventures has been working with the community to establish a coral nursery and rehabilitate nearby reefs that have been damaged by a series of cyclones over recent years. KokoMana has been working with the same community to conserve the recently described Natewa swallowtail butterfly. Both Ocean Ventures and KokoMana have been working with NatureFiji/MareqetiViti to develop a range of ecotourism products, highlighting the location’s unique biodiversity and ecological connections, ‘from ridge to reef’, under the banner of Vusaratu Ecotours.
Based on these existing relationships, Vusaratu community had already declared the area around the coral nursery and reef restoration project to be tabu – protected by traditional agreements. Following the marine ecology experience provided by Ocean Ventures under the second phase of the Leadership Programme, some of the young people have volunteered, as their project, to become wardens of the protected area and monitor the fish populations – hopefully providing evidence (and awareness) of the recovery of the fish stocks, on which the entire community depends for food. Additional initiatives under discussion include replanting of mangroves (which provide breeding grounds for fish and coastal protection) and an ongoing clean-up of the community sea-shore, to get rid of accumulated rubbish and keep it clean in the future.
The community has also decided to plant at least four hundred cocoa trees, in a sustainable agroforestry setting, based on the model explained by KokoMana in the Programme’s terrestrial ecology experience. The model includes not just cocoa but also a range of high-value fruit and nut products that can be woven into the ecotours that the community will offer and into a more sustainable and inclusive livelihoods strategy for the community as a whole.
The community has also decided to plant at least four hundred cocoa trees, in a sustainable agroforestry setting, based on the model explained by KokoMana in the Programme’s terrestrial ecology experience. The model includes not just cocoa but also a range of high-value fruit and nut products that can be woven into the ecotours that the community will offer and into a more sustainable and inclusive livelihoods strategy for the community as a whole.
Evidently, the complex challenges of natural resource management cannot be resolved by a single programme. Perhaps the broader learning from these experiences is that positive changes are most effectively catlysed and sustained in the context of long-term partnerships – exactly the kind of partnerships between communities and responsible tourism enterprises that the Duavata Sustainable Tourism Collective seeks to develop.
