Fiji

By the close of this century, the Fijian tourism that delivered the country a record one million annual arrivals in 2024 will almost certainly have been remade. The reef-and-resort model that built modern Fiji — sun-drenched beaches on Denarau, the postcard reefs of the Mamanucas and the Yasawas, dive boats threading Beqa Lagoon and the Rainbow Reef — was designed for a climate that is already receding. Under the warming pathway the world is most likely to occupy, somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, Fiji's tourism industry will be smaller in coastal footprint, dispersed more widely across the highlands and outer islands, more strongly Indigenous-led, and far more dependent on culture, wellness and adventure than on living coral.

The climate foundations of this transformation are well understood. Roughly half a metre to a metre of sea-level rise relative to the late-twentieth-century baseline is the central expectation for Fiji by 2100, and even under the most aggressive emissions cuts, about thirty centimetres is essentially locked in. Roughly twenty-seven percent of Fiji's population already lives within one kilometre of the coast, and modelling suggests that even modest rises in sea level place a meaningful share of existing buildings in the inundation zone. Tropical cyclone frequency is expected to fall modestly across the South Pacific, but the share of storms that reach Category 4 or 5 intensity, and the rainfall they deliver, will rise sharply. Cyclone Winston in 2016 — the most powerful Southern Hemisphere storm ever recorded, which damaged or destroyed forty thousand homes and inflicted losses equivalent to about a fifth of national GDP — should be understood not as a freak event but as a preview of what most decades will deliver.

The hard-coral reefs that anchor so much of Fiji's brand are the first major casualty. The fourth global mass bleaching event of 2023 and 2024 reached Fijian reefs early and severely, and the trajectory implied by current ocean-temperature projections suggests annual severe-bleaching conditions across most Fijian reefs well before 2050 under any pathway except the most ambitious mitigation scenario. Living coral cover at iconic sites like Great Astrolabe, Cakaulevu and Namena will be patchy at best by century's end. Ocean acidification will continue to erode reef-building capacity even where heat-tolerant species survive. The implications for tourism are stark: dive and snorkel operators will increasingly pivot to what is sometimes called rewilding tourism, with paying guests participating in assisted-evolution coral nurseries, larval seeding and biodiversity census work rather than swimming through intact reefs.

Resort tourism faces the most direct exposure to rising seas and intensified storms. By 2100, most surviving beachfront properties will have undergone some combination of managed retreat, elevation onto stilts, hardened seawalls and re-engineered storm-water systems. Insurance withdrawal will thin the mid-market, leaving a smaller cluster of premium properties capturing higher yield per visitor. Surf tourism at Cloudbreak, Restaurants and Frigates Pass will persist — carbonate reef structures outlast their living coral cover by decades — but higher sea levels will alter wave dynamics in ways that change the character, if not the existence, of these breaks. Cruise tourism, already squeezed by emissions pricing and port-call decarbonisation rules, will likely shift toward smaller expedition-style vessels visiting culturally significant ports like Levuka and the Lau Group rather than the megaship model.

Aviation is perhaps the single largest variable hanging over the entire industry. Fiji is far from every major source market: Australia alone delivered close to half of all 2024 arrivals, and Australia, New Zealand, the United States, China and the United Kingdom together accounted for more than eighty-six percent of tourism earnings. Sustainable aviation fuel and emerging hydrogen-electric corridors will lift the cost of long-haul travel substantially, and Fiji Airways' position as the regional hub will determine how affordable access remains. The likely outcome is a tourism mix skewed toward fewer, longer-stay visitors, a much larger regional Pacific component, and a structural diaspora pillar drawn from Fijian communities in Australia, New Zealand, North America and the United Kingdom returning for vanua and cultural ties.

Fiji's policy response is, by the standards of small-island developing states, unusually advanced. The Climate Change Act of 2021 declares a climate emergency, establishes a legally binding net-zero target for 2050, recognises maritime-boundary continuity under rising seas, and uniquely creates a state-supported legal process for planned community relocation — a framework that may eventually need to be applied to several hundred coastal villages already on the at-risk register. The Low Emission Development Strategy charts a path to near-total renewable electricity generation, with hydropower complemented by a developing geothermal capacity that will help buffer the drought vulnerability the existing grid has shown. Fiji's diplomatic footprint on climate matters — its COP23 presidency, its co-leadership of the Rising Nations Initiative on statehood continuity, its bilateral carbon-trading arrangements with Singapore and Japan — gives it influence disproportionate to its size, though national debt at roughly eighty-three percent of GDP sharply constrains domestic fiscal headroom.

What may matter most for the texture of tourism by 2100 is the Indigenous land tenure system. Roughly eighty-five percent of Fiji's land is communally held by mataqali clans, and the concept of vanua — the inseparable bond of people, land and sea — will increasingly anchor tourism's social licence. The Fiji Locally-Managed Marine Area network already encompasses some hundred and forty-five traditional fishing grounds across more than four hundred villages, and this community-led, consent-based model is the most plausible template for a national tourism-governance architecture by century's end. Revenue-sharing built around customary qoliqoli rights, leases negotiated through the iTaukei Land Trust Board, and a steadily more central role for Indo-Fijian heritage in the national tourism story will define what sustainable practice actually looks like on the ground.

Artificial intelligence will sit across all of this as both stabiliser and wrecking ball. On the positive side, reef monitoring through platforms descended from today's satellite-and-machine-learning coral atlases will guide assisted-evolution coral selection and restoration triage, while improved cyclone forecasting will extend the lead times that were tragically short during Winston. Acoustic and camera-trap monitoring will help protect endemic species; dynamic visitor dispersal will manage carrying capacity at sites like Bouma and the Sigatoka Sand Dunes; large-language-model tools, if carefully governed, may help preserve oral traditions and indigenous languages. The risks are equally substantial. Offshore platforms already capture a rising share of tourism margin, and algorithmic intermediation could concentrate value far from mataqali communities unless mandated revenue-sharing rules evolve from Fiji's existing tourism levy regime. Algorithmic gatekeeping threatens small village operators without strong digital footprints. Synthetic cultural content — kava ceremonies, meke dances, firewalking imagery — can already be generated and monetised without the consent of the communities to which it belongs, and no binding framework yet protects iTaukei intellectual property from this kind of extraction.

The most likely sustainable tourism in Fiji by 2100, then, will not look like a restored version of the late-twentieth-century model. It will be Indigenous-governed, with mataqali and qoliqoli rights determining access, pricing and consent. It will be shifted inland and uphill, toward Sovi Basin, Colo-i-Suva, Bouma and the relocated villages on higher ground. It will be climate-adaptive in its physical design, built on stilts and off-grid renewables, with managed retreat planning embedded in every lease. It will be led by culture, wellness, language immersion, traditional medicine and slow-travel village stays rather than reef-based volume. It will be smaller in arrivals but higher in yield, and it will be partly funded by loss-and-damage transfers and carbon-market flows that did not exist in any meaningful form a decade ago. Whether it becomes a global model of dignified adaptation or a thinned regional remnant depends on choices — about emissions, about finance, about technology governance, about Pacific mobility — that will largely be made elsewhere. But the architecture for the former exists in Fiji already, and that is the more interesting story.