As the sea recedes, Pacific nations turn to ancestral knowledge to withstand climate change

By Ron Rocky Coloma

In Liliana, a coastal village in the Solomon Islands, the sea swallowed three rows of graves. More than 200 ancestors now lie beneath rising tides. For years, community members watched the shoreline retreat, waiting for help that never came. When none arrived, they built their own seawall—by hand, with coconut trunks, stones and the guidance of elders who had mapped tides long before weather apps and satellite scans.

The project cost less than 9,000 Solomon Islands dollars. It saved their village.

Across the Pacific, such acts of resilience are growing—not in reaction to climate change alone, but in defiance of development models that erase Indigenous systems in favor of foreign prescriptions.

Faced with environmental degradation, cultural erasure and political marginalization, many Pacific Islanders are turning inward. They are looking to ancestral knowledge, customary governance and the stories etched into their land and sea to find pathways through the climate crisis.

Their message is clear: sustainability is not new here. It is remembered.

“We cannot lose what lives in our blood,” said Millicent Barty, founder of Kastom Keepers, a Solomon Islands organization that supports climate-affected communities by restoring traditional knowledge systems.

For Barty, whose design and communications work bridges ancestral memory and modern planning, governance isn’t a foreign framework. It’s a lived system passed down through custom houses, village rituals and the hands of women who teach weaving as philosophy.

“At 5 years old, my grandmother gave me three coconut fronds and said weaving would help me understand the universe,” Barty said. “She was right. Our governance is in the loom.”

In Liliana, that philosophy helped save not just land, but the village’s authority over itself. After decades of coastal erosion and no sustainable outside intervention, the community restored a traditional fa’i—a custom house for intergenerational learning and governance—then used reef knowledge and tidal cycles to construct a 60-meter seawall.

Their success challenged the dominant narrative that effective climate responses must come from top-down development. “We’re not romanticizing the past,” Barty said. “We’re restoring its logic.”

For Solomon Islands scholar and University of Hawai‘i professor Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, that restoration starts with remembering land not as commodity, but as memory. He views environmental governance not as an abstract legal exercise but as a living archive of relationships.

“Tenure systems are not just legal structures,” Kabutaulaka said. “They are stories, inscribed onto landscapes.”

From the Hawaiian name Pu‘uloa—the original name for what is now called Pearl Harbor—to the village-level totems across Fiji, place names encode responsibility. Erasing them means erasing the duties that communities carry to protect those places.

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“When we talk about land registration, what we’re really doing is registering stories,” he said. “And when we lose those stories, we lose the basis of our governance.”

Kabutaulaka points to Palau as a leading example, where the national marine protected area framework is built on the bul, a traditional system of conservation. By expanding Indigenous logic into formal law, Palau created a model where ancient and modern governance coexist.

But too often, he warns, outside conservation organizations bring ready-made systems instead of asking what already exists. “Customary governance doesn’t need to be invented,” he said. “It needs to be respected.”

In Fiji, environmental advocate Alisi Rabukawaqa sees that respect starts with identity. “You cannot separate our culture from our conservation,” she said. “Totems are not decoration. They are instructions.”

In her work promoting vakatabu, a principle of sacredness and protection, Rabukawaqa highlights the role of Indigenous rites of passage—not just as cultural artifacts, but as systems of ecological stewardship.

“When a girl is sent to gather firewood for the first time, it’s a sign she’s ready to serve her community,” she explained. “That act isn’t just symbolic. It’s a step into governance.”

From the baby who is never placed on the ground in her first four days, to the adolescent tasked with her first meal’s fire, Rabukawaqa sees cultural rituals as developmental milestones that can be reactivated in today’s world. “We’ve replaced them with Sweet 16s and degrees,” she said. “We should bring both together.”

She also emphasized the need to recognize that Indigenous knowledge is not passive. It evolves, it adapts and it serves.

“To lead, we must learn to serve,” she said. “Our word for service, veiraraki, literally means to face each other. That’s what governance looks like to us.”

Across the region, there is growing urgency to push back against extractive development models and external aid frameworks that ignore or overwrite Pacific ways of knowing. Indigenous leaders argue that climate solutions must be rooted in context, and that context is often centuries old.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s clarity.

From marine protections rooted in taboo, to village governance woven through coconut mats and sea knowledge, Pacific peoples are showing how relational systems—between people, land and ocean—can hold the line where legal codes and budgets fail.

“We’ve always known how to resist, how to repair and how to remember,” Barty said.

In Liliana, where the graves once disappeared into the tide, the villagers now gather near their newly built seawall. Children run on the ground once lost. Elders pass on songs, names and stories.

There, the future is not a program. It is a place, held in memory and rebuilt by hand.

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