Climate change: Are women in Tonga looking for a new land to call home?

A small team from the University of Waikato is leading a two-year project about how climate change affects people departing their homelands in Tonga and Samoa.

Researchers include Professor Sandy Morrison and project lead Lora Vaioleti, who joined Pacific Mornings to elaborate on their studies.

Vaioleti said a survey with 600 respondees revealed there was particular interest from Tongan women to leave the Kingdom, a gender difference not reflected in the Samoan respondents.

"Women seem to be more willing in Tonga to move than men. There is a pent-up desire for some people, a small-ish population, to move. But we also found that a lot of people are very steadfast in their feelings of staying as well.

"As you would imagine, the younger populations were definitely more keen to be moving."

Photo: RNZ Pacific/Finau Fonua

Their findings also showed climate change mobility was already in motion and communities expected inevitable displacement. This sentiment was reinforced by massive events like the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai eruption, Cyclone Gita in 2018, and the Samoa earthquake and tsunami in 2009.

Vaioleti said for some of their respondents, the choice was a hard bullet to bite.

"People are anticipating that in the near future, they will have to move in some part because of the impacts of climate change. We know it's happening, we know people are thinking about it, and we know that it's a factor in people's decision making in Tonga and Samoa."

Commissioned by the NZ's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, this project is part of a wider programme that started in 2022 involving nine Pacific countries.

With the mission of understanding how Pacific communities are adapting to the imminent changes, various methods of engagement with over 800 people so far, include:

• conducting surveys
• future scenario planning workshops
• one-on-one talanoa with leaders from government, village, and business spaces

Vaioleti said exploring these stories helped to fully reflect cultural, moral and logical solutions for people in Tonga and Samoa.

"We wanted to make sure we were tapping into people's beliefs, their assumptions, their knowledge. And you can't get that just by asking them interview questions.

"We do need numbers but we also wanted to make sure we were gathering really rich data and rich stories."

Tongan community leaders in New Zealand meet one year on from the Tonga disaster at a church event organised by the Tongan Council of Churches and the Aotearoa Tonga Response Group. (file image) Photo: RNZ Pacific/Lydia Lewis

The team is now starting to sift through data found from researching pastoral care with Tongan and Samoan families living in Aotearoa, Australia, and the United States.

According to Vaioleti, 30 percent of Tongan families in NZ were directly supporting their families' climate change adaptation in the Pacific.

"[This is] a really critical role that diaspora are playing in terms of climate change resilience in the Pacific that I think is something for policy makers to keep in mind going forward."

- RNZI