As tourism returns to the Pacific, there is a renewed focus on sustainable travel

Photo: Rivers Fiji: YouTube. Retrieved from abc.net.au

Locals call the Upper Navua River — which flows through a tropical canyon in Fiji — “the highway to our ancestors”.

Kasimiro Taukeinikoro’s company Rivers Fiji offers rafting experiences along the river, but as visitors arrive he asks them to treat the place with the same respect they would their own homes.

Concerned the area — located in one of Fiji’s most valuable mahogany forests — would be compromised by logging or mining, Mr Taukeinikoro said Rivers Fiji convinced the Indigenous land-owning clans, the Mataqali, that low-impact tourism would be a better economic investment.

It was Fiji’s first public-private conservation tourism area focused on sustainable tourism and creating economic opportunities for local communities.

“What we have here, it’s why the tourists come in the first place. They come because of our culture, they come because of our friendliness, they come because of our pristine environment,” Mr Taukeinikoro said.

Tourism development has typically focused on coastal communities, but this initiative and others like it are providing an economic alternative to areas where mining or forestry would have been the only development option in the past.

Rivers Fiji guides tell visitors about the ecosystem, cultural traditions, heritage sites, and local preservation issues, and offer tourists the opportunity to understand daily life of Indigenous Fijians in the rural highlands.

Meanwhile, Rivers Fiji compensates landowners through employment opportunities, lease payments and protection of the area.