The seedlings arrive before the tide. Along the volcanic coast of Taveuni — Fiji’s third-largest island — community members press mangrove roots into the margin between land and sea — unglamorous work that is, in the logic of the climate emergency reshaping Pacific coastlines, among the most consequential being done. Amenatave Yauvoli, Director of the Biodiversity Conservation and Fiji Office at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Program (SPREP), oversees the regional implementation of the multi-donor fund Kiwa Initiative dedicated to scaling Nature-based Solutions across seventeen Pacific Island countries.
“NbS is like a paradigm shift. There’s always emphasis in economic development where there are mangroves — remove them, build hotels, build an access road. And this affects our drive to move forward with strong NbS propositions.” And And Amenatave Yauvoli has made it the measure of his current tenure.
Trajectory
His path to this work ran through every level of the system. He chaired the Group of 77 and China in climate negotiations, served as Fiji’s Ambassador to Indonesia and High Commissioner to Singapore and Malaysia, and chaired the UN Climate Convention’s Subsidiary Body for Implementation — the body that translates conference-hall commitments into the reporting cycles governments navigate year after year. What that vantage point produced was an understanding of what international frameworks promise and what they fail to deliver: SIDS bearing disproportionate climate burdens while dedicating scarce institutional capacity to overlapping indicators that rarely align.
To him, the Kiwa Initiative’s response is structural. Its central output is a regional NbS data hub, co-developed with IUCN and New Zealand partners, harmonizing indicators across partner countries and feeding directly into national development planning. Because SPREP is a treaty-based organization, data belongs to member countries. “It is important that this data are well protected, well managed for the benefit of the sustainable development of these nations” — a principle aligned with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent.
The work on the ground
In Malaita, Solomon Islands, mangrove planting revealed a local species consumed by the community — a protein source entirely unknown in Fiji. In Taveuni, restoration improves watershed management and generates income through community nursery work. Inclusive planning surfaced saltwater intrusion destroying taro patches managed principally by women: a climate adaptation problem existing monitoring had missed. “Gender equity is not a compliance condition here,” Amenatave says. “It is the mechanism through which community knowledge enters the project cycle at all.”
When COVID-19 closed Fiji’s borders, tourism collapsed. “We saw that during curfew, Fiji lost a significant part of its GDP,” Amenatave recalls. The crisis made structurally explicit what communities along these coastlines have long known: healthy reefs and restored mangroves are not an environmental preference but the foundation on which livelihoods, food systems, and economies rest. What the world calls periphery has, for some time now, been doing the work that the centre has only begun to legislate.
