Before the park’s opening time, Ranadi Cavu is already on the tracks above Sigatoka, checking where the wind cut a new scar into the dune face overnight, and where invasive vines have crept back since her last pass. Her path into conservation began with Fiji’s endangered crested iguanas, cared for at a wildlife park near town; five years on, a call from the National Trust of Fiji (NTF) went out for rangers at Sigatoka’s national park, and she has stayed since. “I’m not protecting this park from behind a desk,” she says of the fire breaks and seedling beds she and four colleagues built by hand.
A sea wall shared with the community
Gazetted in 1989, the Sigatoka Sand Dunes are Fiji’s oldest protected landscape, and among its most exposed: a UNESCO-listed dry-forest ecosystem holding some of the Pacific’s largest burial grounds, standing between a coastal community and a rising sea. “The dunes are effectively a natural sea wall for the whole Sigatoka area,” Ranadi explains, and without them there is nothing left to break the swells. The dunes have also long doubled as an informal training ground for rugby, netball and football; without fencing or a buffer zone, an unattended fire can spread into a restoration site within hours. Balancing these claims means treating the Indo-Fijian community, iTaukei landowners and government agencies as equal partners, guided by provincial and advisory councils. “We wear two hats,” Ranadi says of her fellow rangers, most drawn from surrounding villages: community members first, Trust employees second.
What renewal makes possible
Kiwa Initiative funding, signed in 2022 and renewed this year through March 2027, has let NTF turn that balance into practice. “One of the first things we won’t do is reach for chemicals,” Ranadi says; restoration means replanting native species, clearing invasive African tulip from the Driodrio dry forest, and rebuilding fire breaks, the second recently completed. Nearly a thousand trees have gone into the ground across two nurseries and three restoration sites, tracked hectare by hectare. Ownership runs deeper than planting: a volunteer corps of fifteen young landowners once ran the entire park; finances and patrols included, while senior staff were away, and returned it exactly as it should be.
The trees that remember
Some of the clearest proof of that trust came from women old enough to be grandmothers. In 2024, NTF invited a group in their sixties for International Women’s Day; rather than the main track, rangers found a shorter route through the forest, and the women filled it with stories, naming herbal medicinal plants the rangers had not thought to protect. Deeper in stand what NTF calls “tree huggers,” vine formations shaped like women; Ranadi explained their meaning, a nod to women who, in the 1800s, physically embraced trees to stop them being felled, and to women as symbols of protection, of nurturing what cannot yet protect itself. “It was more of an exchange, Ranadi says, we learned from them more than they learned from us.” NTF set aside a planting site that day, now known as the IWD site, so the women can return and watch what they started grow.
Raising the rangers who come after
That same instinct, to teach through the land rather than about it, runs through Heritage in Young Hands. Since 2016, its “Touch, Know, Care” approach has taken children onto the dunes, moving them from EcoCamp freshman through Dune 101 and Dune 201 to junior ranger over three years. “Several of its first graduates now study law, GIS and medicine; one has returned as a colleague, reminding each cohort he once sat where they sit now.” Renewed Kiwa support extends the model beyond Sigatoka, to Yadua Island and Ovalau. Ranadi measures that success in a longer arc: in about five years, she tells rangers, planting beside her; “these trees will be mature enough to pick fruit from something you planted yourself. It’s succession planning for conservation — the very children who joined Heritage in Young Hands in 2016 are still working with us today,” she says, proof that the dunes’ real seawall is the generation now being trained to inherit them.
