Fiji’s first Indigenous-owned carbon credit project

LABASA, Fiji — No one finds their way to the village of Drawa by accident. To get there, you must first board a tiny plane to Labasa, the biggest town on Fiji’s Vanua Levu Island. Driving southwest past hectares of sugarcane plantations and forests riven with gashes of red earth, you’ll pass pickup trucks piled high and wide with tightly bound stacks of the starchy cane stems, and loggers tugging loads of freshly cut tree trunks to one of the island’s many sawmills.

When you turn off the highway onto an unassuming gravel side road in the center of the island, your four-wheel-drive vehicle will shudder and shake as the track deteriorates into humps and hollows of greasy orange mud. But the view more than makes up for it: you’ll ford perfectly clear rivers and climb precipitously through tracts of deep-green cloud forest, before eventually parking among a scattering of colorful timber houses at the bend of a river at the very end of the road.

Source: The Mongabay News

Date: 12/09/2023