From fruit trees and flowers to a marine area full of fish, the ecosystems around the village of Sunae have provided for its people for many years, as they have cared for it in return.

Now, the people of Sunae want to share their environment, and their culture, with others, by establishing an ecotourism initiative to help ensure both can be sustained into the future.

‘Ecotourism is a good initiative,’ said Sunae chief, Joel Matuele. ‘We will protect what’s ours and we won’t sell our land like other villages.’

Having seen other communities sell off their land to be used for resorts or their natural resources, Sunae is eager to both protect their land while also providing additional sources of livelihood. This led them to include it in their resilience planning through the Climate Resilient Islands programme, alongside the complementary action of formally establishing a marine Community Conservation Area.

Working alongside the Live & Learn Vanuatu CRI team, the community has begun developing their ecotourism initiative, including drafting a visitor itinerary. Visits will likely involve a village tour, a demonstration of cooking the traditional dish laplap, a boat ride to an oyster farm and snorkelling site, fish feeding and more.

With Sunae’s most common income sources involving selling food – either vegetables or fish and other seafood – this ecotourism initiative would boost their income and add more diverse income sources, which the community noted in their Resilience Profile was an important part of improving resilience. It would especially help the women in the community to find new sources of income.

‘We would like to create an ecotourism product here in Sunae to help our community protect our area, so that tourists can see what we have protected, and to also help our community earn income,’ says Leisavi Joel, a Sunae resident and female Vanua’tai Network Monitor. ‘Our Mamas too can sell their handicrafts that will be able to help them earn money and support their livelihood.’

This is closely linked to their efforts to establish their conservation area as one formally registered with the government, to ensure that the beautiful nature they wish to share with visitors can be maintained.

‘We have seen the importance of the CCA,’ Leisavi says. ‘It will provide fish for us, and it will protect our marine resources so that our future generations can also enjoy it. And we can earn money out of it.’

‘We are happy to share with other people so that they can see the beauty in our community.’

With issues like poaching, sea level rise, erosion and an increase in algae, Sunae aims to counter these impacts using the combined initiatives of the CCA and ecotourism.

They aren’t alone in this. Live & Learn Vanuatu is also working with the Loru/Kole community to establish an ecotourism project, which will integrate with their pre-existing CCA on Santo Island. The community of Kerepua – another participating CRI community –  has also for several years managed an ecotourism project alongside a large CCA, both of which Live & Learn Vanuatu helped establish.

In Sunae, work is well underway. A recent scoping visit by a Shefa Tourism Development officer, alongside Leisavi, found that an ecotourism initiative within the Sunae community offers a significant opportunity for sustainable development by leveraging local expertise, natural assets and community involvement. Initiatives like business planning, training, ecotourism activity development and more are now being done to progress the pathway further, tuning the plans into something that helps Sunae build their resilience.

Leisavi says this is progressing well so far, providing a clear pathway for a sustainable future.

‘We are growing,’ she says. ‘The information and capacity trainings that have been provided to us help us to grow.

‘Through these activities that we do working towards our priority pathways help us to help our future children.’

Chief Matuele agrees, saying that the work on the CCA and ecotourism project is not only about sharing it with visitors to Sunae, but also about sharing it with future generations.

‘We want to bring back our sea to its rightful place,’ he says. “We want to plant trees so that our future children see that we the elders have looked after our resources well.

‘For our future in Sunae, we want to bring back the things we have lost. Through climate change, things have changed; with this programme in our community, Sunae will really change, so that we are able to help our community.’