On the fifth day after the burial of their chief, Seru Moce, 66, and other clan members gathered for a meeting to decide what portion of the sea to protect in memory of their deceased leader. For generations, Indigenous iTaukei people in Fiji have not only protected a loved one’s burial grounds, but also freshwater and marine areas in their memory.

“Funerary protected areas hold much significance for the iTaukei way of life and conservation,” Moce said. “It’s a part of our livelihood, culture and sustainable management of resources.”

It’s a practice that still endures today, though it has evolved across the country, a group of researchers who sought to bring light to this understudied type of protected area found. “Despite more than three decades of conservation efforts in Fiji,” they said, conservationists did not document aquatic funerary protected areas (or FPAs). This, they said, prevented the use of FPAs as a potential resource management strategy for the country.

Upon the burial of a family member or community chief on clan land, local Fijians demarcate customary tabu (no-go closed-off areas) as protected areas in a freshwater or marine ecosystem. The size varies and tends to be larger for chiefs but are small compared with typical protected areas, ranging from 1-10 hectares (2.5-25 acres). For chiefs, the FPA could stretch from the shoreline to the outermost reef.

These traditional protected areas forbid people from fishing and harvesting marine species from the area until a funerary feast. The gathering typically comes 100 nights or a year after the demarcation.

With this practice, observed since time immemorial, according to sources, Fijians have managed their waters and marine resources as a part of life and culture. Today, some even seek legal rights and ownership over the marine areas to strengthen community-led conservation practices.

Following the completion of the tabu period they have allocated, the community organizesa cultural gathering for a feast prepared with fish, turtles, and invertebrates harvested from the area protected for the deceased. While sea turtles, including the green turtle (Chelonia mydas) and Hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata), are specially harvested for a chief’s funerary feast, local fishermen harvest fish and invertebrates for the funerary feasts of other community members. Conservationists say these final celebration feasts have not negatively impact species in the protected area.

“Given that the turtles are legally protected from harvest, we [now] seek permission from the local government to use a limited number of turtles to perform our cultural rites,” Moce told Mongabay.

FPAs were larger in the past

Fiji has 1,171 iTaukei villages spread across 189 districts in 14 provinces. The recent study published by the group of researchers in Conservation Biology looked at districts spread across the island archipelago. The goal, the authors said, was to show the level of awareness, practices and challenges of FPAs among the Indigenous Fijians that could help determine local and national conservation goals and strategies.

Across the study area, 73 districts (42%) actively implemented FPAs while 34 districts (19%) had ceased FPA implementation altogether. Twenty-two districts (13%), occasionally implement FPAs and 46 districts (26%) had no FPAs, according to the study.

While 188 FPAs were established from the 1960s to 2019, 44% of FPAs were protected for 100 nights, and 47% protected all resources and associated ecosystems in the FPA.

“A few of the communities ceased to practice due to less knowledge and value placed on FPAs and the traditional and financial burdens of carrying out FPA rituals,” said Ron Vave, assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and the study’s lead author.

FPAs were also much larger and more respected in the past, the researchers found, based on interviews with local informants. While they came across a few exceptionally large ones for chiefs, it wasn’t the norm. In the 1900s, for one chief, 2,200 hectares (5,400 acres) of fringing reef was protected, while for another in the 1960s, 64,500 hectares (159,400 acres) of marine area was under tabu.

To mark a funerary protected area in freshwater systems, communities have used anything from the stems of gasau or reed (Miscanthus japonicus), Fijian asparagus (Saccharum edule) or traditional bark cloth (tapa). The message: Respect the area and don’t harvest anything. While this has prevented some communities from harvesting anything, others have fished and harvested some species — to a certain extent — but not others.

About 25% of districts today still harvest edible fish and invertebrates within their FPAs while another 22% harvest edible fish and the turtles that are reserved only for the chief’s funeral.

“For the funerary feast, a group of men fish in the tabu area and they harvest whatever is available. For example, in the last funerary feast, people around my area only harvested fish including groupers (Epinephelinae) and trevally (Caranx ignobilis), as they were the ones available,” Moce told Mongabay.

FPAs in marine systems are decided and demarcated depending on areas that are crucial to some of the fish and turtle species that are threatened, Moce said. And it’s not only for funerary purposes. When any fish populations decline, he said, the community decides to revive them, be they reef fish or giant trevally fish, by protecting the areas through demarcating them as tabu.

FPAs as a conservation strategy?

Since communities in Fiji heavily depend on fisheries for subsistence, and given the decline in a few species, Moce said the need for conservation efforts is urgent. But it’s not possible to do so in isolation and without the participation of Indigenous and local communities, he said.

Aquatic FPAs were not originally intended as biodiversity conservation tools, and especially not today, due to their small size, but they can contribute to a conservation ethic within communities, the authors said. They are also a tool of community engagement and sustainable resource governance, Vave said. After communities saw high fish catches from the small, short duration FPAs, this likely contributed to their rapid adoption of larger marine protected areas.

According to the authors, growing interest in “other effective area-based conservation measures,” known as OECMs, (a category of protected areas recognized within the global biodiversity framework) may allow some traditional management areas to be recognized for their conservation value. But this does not include FPAs, which are harvested after a short period of protection.

Though, said Vave, FPAs are still “important for cultural ecosystem services, food provisioning and sovereignty, which could negatively affect sociocultural, economic and conservation areas if FPA practices cease to be implemented.”

Although, Fiji’s central government recognizes the customary usage and management of these protected marine areas by the iTaukei people, some locals want stronger legal rights in the form of ownership for the communities — even though the areas are temporary. They say this is key to strengthening the conservation process holistically, as so far the government holds ultimate ownership of near-shore areas.

“The legal ownership of the fishing grounds should be bestowed to the customary owners, as they hold the traditional knowledge and share a symbiotic relationship with the marine areas,” Moce said.

For communities that still practice, FPAs are considered sacred, he said. “But when we don’t have the legal rights over these marine areas, chances are that we can neither practically protect our FPAs nor take action against illegal fishing and poaching activities,” he told Mongabay.

So far, FPAs are rarely recognized and used as a conservation strategy in the country. WCS Fiji, which leads a few conservation projects in the region, told Mongabay that the NGO has included FPAs in their ecosystem-based management plan in addition to conservation areas.

“Indigenous stewardship of marine resources has strengthened and realistically sustained the traditions that have been passed on from generations,” said Sirilo Dulunaqio, a community representative from the Kubulau district in northern Fiji and community liaison officer at WCS Fiji.

But these practices are “less studied and documented, and this undermines the significant roles, participation and leadership of Indigenous communities in marine conservation,” he said.

The authors agreed, and said this absence in scientific literature could displace traditional strategies favored by communities with contemporary conservation strategies that cause conflict. Scientists and conservationists along with community members should be more engaged in studying FPAs, assessing their biodiversity impacts and providing recommendations to make them even more sustainable.

So far, however, community sources Mongabay spoke to said they were not involved enough in the country’s marine conservation efforts.

“Isolating community people reap no beneficial outcome as community people have traditional and customary ways of governing and coexisting with these water sources,” Vave said. Some also are not in agreement over fishing restrictions they face in non-FPA protected areas.

Banner image: Fishing in Fiji. Image courtesy of Tom Vierus/WCS.

Study finds locally managed marine areas in Fiji yield mixed results

Latest Mongabay podcast episode: Many companies meet climate pledges on paper — not on the ground, analyst says. Listen here:

Citation:

Vave, R., Friedlander, A. M., Kittinger, J. N., & Ticktin, T. (2024). Cultural ecosystem services and the conservation challenges for an Indigenous people’s aquatic protected area practice. Conservation Biology, 38(6). https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14403

Feedback: Use this form to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.