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The drua was among the largest ocean-going vessels built in the Pacific before European contact. Its hulls were not dugouts but plank-built: sections of vesi hardwood shaped and sewn edge to edge with magimagi, cord plaited from coconut husk fibre. No metal was used anywhere in the hull. The two hulls were deliberately unequal, the smaller one always kept to windward, and both ends of each hull were identical. A drua did not tack; it shunted, so the bow became the stern and the huge triangular pandanus-mat sail was shifted to the other end. Large drua reached roughly 30 metres and carried well over a hundred people plus livestock and cargo, with contemporary accounts reporting speeds near fifteen knots. Large nineteenth-century drua do not survive as intact hulls. Ratu Finau, held by the Fiji Museum, is a later 1913 Fulaga-built canoe measuring about 13.4 metres.

Lapita pottery is named for the technique that defines it: fine repeated impressions pressed into wet clay with a toothed, or dentate, stamp, often filled with white lime so the pattern lifts against the red-brown surface. Fiji's earliest known Lapita settlement is Bourewa, on the Rove Peninsula near Natadola in southwest Viti Levu, identified in December 2003 and excavated over roughly six years by Patrick Nunn, Sepeti Matararaba and Roselyn Kumar of the University of the South Pacific. Occupation there began about 3,100 years ago, around 1150–1100 BCE, by people whose voyage crossed some 950 kilometres of open ocean from the Vanuatu area. Finds include sherds from a vessel estimated at over a metre tall carrying a stylised face — eyes and nose picked out in lime infill. Some general accounts date Fiji's settlement to as early as 3,500 years ago; the excavated Fijian dates cluster nearer 3,000–3,100.

Pacific voyagers navigated without compass, chart or clock. Instead they carried a star compass in the mind: the horizon divided into named points marking where particular stars rise and set, held steady through the night as one star sets and the next takes its place on the same bearing. The widely taught modern version, developed by Nainoa Thompson from teaching by the Satawalese master navigator Mau Piailug, divides the horizon into 32 houses of 11.25 degrees each, and navigators learn the rising and setting positions of roughly 220 stars. Stars were only part of the system. Wayfinders also read the direction of long ocean swells, cloud form and colour over unseen islands, and the dawn and dusk flight of land-roosting birds such as the noio tern. Fiji's own navigational vocabulary is less completely recorded than Hawaiian and Micronesian systems, and much of today's revival draws on those traditions.

Fiji's first settlers arrived with a complete toolkit and adapted it to local reefs. Giant clam shell (Tridacna) was worked into adzes cut from the thick hinge and dorsal sections. Trochus niloticus was ground into one-piece fishhooks. Conus shell dominated the worked-shell assemblages, yielding rings, beads, bracelets and small adzes — and Lapita workers consistently favoured the black-and-white spotted Conus species, an aesthetic choice rather than a practical one. At Bourewa, broken Conus rings were repaired and re-drilled, some up to three separate times, showing these were curated valuables rather than disposable items. Alongside the shellwork, excavators recovered large stone adzes for canoe building, axes and small chisels, mostly made from local dacite greenstone. Together the assemblage describes daily life: line fishing and reef gleaning for food, heavy woodworking for canoes and houses, and skilled ornament making.

A bure is built from what the land provides. Its frame is hardwood posts and beams bound with plant-fibre lashings — coconut sennit magimagi, or in some districts cord from tiri mangrove roots — rather than nails. Roof and often walls are thatched with reed, sago palm frond or coconut leaf depending on the district and what grows nearby. The steep, high-pitched roof sheds heavy rain, vents hot air, and presents a rounded form that spills cyclone winds rather than catching them. Underneath sits the yavu, a raised platform of packed earth and stone. The yavu is more than a footing: it marks a family's inherited place in the village and its link to the ancestors who first built there. Bure are usually raised by solesolevaki, communal labour in which the village builds together. Navala in Ba is the best-known village where every house is still built this way.

The lali is cut from a single log of dense, resonant timber — dilo, tavola or vesi — hollowed into a trough so the walls ring when struck with wooden beaters. Traditionally it was felled and roughed out in the forest with stone adzes, then carried home, sometimes for miles, and finished by hand. Sizes vary with purpose and with the standing of the village: small lali ni meke of roughly 30 to 60 centimetres give the sharp, piercing beat that drives dance, while large ceremonial lali run to several feet and can be heard across a valley. The rhythms are a code, not just noise. Distinct beats announced an attack, a siege or a victory, called allies for help, proclaimed a truce, and marked the death of a chief. Today the lali most often calls people to church, to a village meeting, or to school.

Yaqona is made from the root of Piper methysticum, a plant in the pepper family. The dried root, or waka, is pounded and mixed with water in the tanoa, a broad carved wooden bowl, then served in a bilo, a polished half coconut shell. The drink is non-alcoholic and not hallucinogenic; its active kavalactones produce relaxation and mild calm. What matters most is the protocol around it. A visitor arriving in a village presents a bundle of waka in a sevusevu — a formal offering asking permission to be there — received by the turaga ni koro and accepted on the chief's behalf by his herald, the matanivanua. The cobo, a deep cupped-hand clap, punctuates the ceremony. The bilo is served in order of rank, the chief first from a personal cup no one else uses, with maca called when a cup is emptied.

Masi is made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry, Broussonetia papyrifera. Women strip the bast from the stems, soak it for around a day, then beat it with a wooden mallet, the ike, until it spreads into a thin sheet. Sheets are pasted together to build large cloths rather than felted into one, a method that distinguishes Fijian work from some neighbouring traditions. Fiji is also distinctive in the Pacific for stencilling: patterns are cut into draudrau — traditionally leaf, now often x-ray film — and pigment applied through the cut-outs. Other cloths are smoked to a warm red-brown, or rubbed over a carved kupeti tablet, a Tongan-influenced method used in Lau to produce gatu vakatoga favoured in chiefly ceremony. Cakaudrove is known for painted masi bolabola. Masi wraps newborns, dresses brides, lines funerals and clothes a chief at installation.

In iTaukei society a person belongs to a nested set of groups. The i tokatoka is the extended family unit. Several tokatoka form a mataqali, or clan. Several mataqali form a yavusa, the largest kinship group, tracing descent from a common founding ancestor. Yavusa attached to a territory make up the vanua, headed by a paramount chief; alliances of vanua form a matanitu. Vanua carries all of this at once — the land, the people on it, the ancestors and the obligations between them. Membership is recorded in the Vola ni Kawa Bula, the register of iTaukei administered through the iTaukei Lands Commission, and the mataqali is normally the landholding unit. Since 1940 the iTaukei Land Trust Board has administered leasing on owners' behalf. Published figures for iTaukei-owned land vary, commonly cited between about 87 and 91 percent of Fiji's total.

Europeans reached Fiji late and cautiously. In 1643 the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman sighted the northern islands — Vanua Levu and the Taveuni group — while searching for a southern continent. Captain James Cook touched one of the southern Lau islands in 1774. In 1789 William Bligh sailed an open boat through the archipelago after the mutiny on HMS Bounty, pursued by Fijian canoes, and returned to chart the group in 1792. The strait between Viti Levu and Vanua Levu still carries his name: Bligh Water. These voyages produced Europe's first charts of Fiji, but they were brief encounters. Fiji's reefs had a fearsome reputation among mariners, and for decades ships avoided the group. Fijian societies were already ancient, organised and connected across the ocean; the newcomers were passing strangers.

In 1804 sandalwood was found on the southwestern coast of Vanua Levu, around Bua Bay. Word reached Sydney and a rush followed: traders exchanged iron tools, muskets, cloth and whale teeth for fragrant wood bound for Canton. The accessible stands were stripped within a decade and the trade collapsed between about 1810 and 1814. By the 1820s traders returned for bêche-de-mer, the dried sea cucumber prized in China, which required shore stations, firewood and large amounts of Fijian labour. Levuka on Ovalau grew into Fiji's first European-style town. The trade brought wealth and firearms to coastal chiefs — Bau especially — intensifying warfare and shifting the balance between confederacies. It also brought new diseases, foreign debts, beachcombers and the first permanent foreign residents in the islands.

A tabua is a sperm whale tooth, smoothed, polished and hung on a braided cord of coconut fibre. It is never simply handed over: it is presented, with formal words, to open a request, seal a marriage, welcome a guest in sevusevu, mark a death, or offer apology in matanigasau. To accept a tabua is to accept the obligation that comes with it. Tabua were once scarce, obtained from stranded whales or through Tongan exchange, and were held by chiefs and people of high standing. In the early nineteenth century European and Tongan traders brought thousands of whale teeth into Fiji, and their sudden abundance changed how they were used politically. Tabua remain central to iTaukei life today, and their export is tightly controlled under CITES and Fijian law.

Three Tahitian teachers of the London Missionary Society arrived in 1830. On 12 October 1835 the Wesleyan missionaries William Cross and David Cargill landed at Lakeba in Lau, accompanied by Tongan teachers, and began translating scripture into Fijian. Conversion moved through chiefs: when a chief accepted the lotu, his people generally followed. On 30 April 1854 Seru Epenisa Cakobau, Vunivalu of Bau, offered his soro and converted, and Methodism spread rapidly across the group. The process was not smooth. In 1867 the Reverend Thomas Baker and seven Fijian Christian colleagues were killed in the Navosa highlands of Viti Levu; explanations differ, though a breach of chiefly protocol is commonly cited. In 2003 the people of Navatusila performed a matanigasau, a formal ceremony of apology and reconciliation, with Baker's descendants.

By the 1870s Cakobau's position was untenable. An American compensation claim arising from an 1849 fire at the US consul John Brown Williams's store had grown to roughly US$44,000, with published figures varying, and was pressed by visits from United States warships. Cakobau had offered to cede Fiji to Britain in 1858 through Consul William Thomas Pritchard; Britain declined in 1862. In 1871 settlers and chiefs established a Kingdom of Fiji at Levuka with Cakobau as Tui Viti, but the new government could not manage its debts, its settler population or the resistance of interior peoples. Britain reconsidered, and on 10 October 1874 Cakobau, the Tongan chief Enele Ma'afu and other senior chiefs signed two copies of the Deed of Cession. Cakobau sent his war club to Queen Victoria.

Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon governed Fiji from June 1875 to January 1880. Arriving in the aftermath of the measles epidemic, he built an administration that governed iTaukei Fijians through existing structures rather than replacing them: provinces headed by Roko Tui, a Great Council of Chiefs established in 1876, native regulations, and taxation paid in produce rather than cash. He halted the sale of Fijian land, which could be leased but not sold, and prohibited the use of Fijians as plantation labour. From 1880 a Native Lands Commission recorded which mataqali held which land, work continued today by the iTaukei Lands and Fisheries Commission. These policies preserved iTaukei land and chiefly authority. They also fixed one version of Fijian custom into colonial law, and, by closing off Fijian labour, led directly to the recruitment of indentured labourers from India.

In December 1874 Cakobau and his sons travelled to Sydney following cession. They returned in January 1875 aboard a Royal Navy vessel while members of the party were still infectious, and no effective quarantine was imposed. Fijian communities had no prior exposure to measles and therefore no immunity, and gatherings called to receive the returning chiefs helped carry the disease rapidly through the islands. Within a few months an estimated 40,000 people had died — most commonly given as about a third of the iTaukei population, with some historians estimating closer to a quarter. Villages lost elders, healers, planters and chiefs at once. Gardens went untended and famine followed. The epidemic devastated the population the new colonial government had just assumed responsibility for, and it weighed heavily on the labour policies adopted immediately afterwards.

Sugar was tried in Fiji from the 1860s, but the industry took its lasting shape when the Australian-owned Colonial Sugar Refining Company began operations in 1880 and its first mill at Nausori crushed cane in 1882. Further mills followed at Rarawai in Ba (1886), Labasa (1894) and Lautoka (1903), with Penang acquired in 1926. CSR bought freehold land, leased iTaukei land, laid tramlines and ports, and relied on indentured labourers brought from India from 1879 until the system ended. Afterwards the company leased its estates to small tenant farmers, mostly Indo-Fijian families working holdings of a few hectares, and bought their cane. CSR controlled milling, pricing and transport across the industry. It withdrew in 1973, when the Fiji Sugar Corporation took over the mills.

The Leonidas sailed from Calcutta in early 1879 and anchored off Levuka on 14 May after a voyage of roughly three months. Records differ on her complement: emigration registers count 498 people who embarked — 273 men, 146 women and 79 children — while contemporary Fiji Times reporting gives about 522 aboard. What is not disputed is the sickness. Cholera and dysentery broke out days after leaving India and seventeen people died at sea. Levuka had no quarantine facility, so one was built in days on the uninhabited island of Yanuca Lailai, where some 700 Fijian men raised twenty bure, a hospital and a store. Fifteen more died there. The 463 survivors were released on 9 August 1879 and sent to the plantations. The surviving figures do not reconcile exactly — 498 embarked less 32 recorded deaths leaves 466 — a discrepancy that sits in the colonial records themselves. Nukulau, off Suva, became the main quarantine and immigration depot for the ships that followed.

Girmit is the labourers' own word for agreement, the contract each person signed or thumb-marked before sailing. It bound them to five years of work in Fiji. A man was paid one shilling a day and a woman ninepence, for nine hours' work on five days and five hours on Saturday. Employers could instead set a task — nominally the amount an ordinary worker could complete in six hours, three-quarters of that for women — but overseers routinely set tasks that took far longer, and unfinished work meant reduced or no pay. After five years a labourer became free, but only ten years' residence earned a government-paid return passage to India. Rations, housing and medical care were provided. Refusing work was a criminal offence, not a civil one. Girmitiya memory names the whole system narak — hell.

The Colonial Sugar Refining Company, an Australian firm, began operating in Fiji in 1880. Its Nausori mill crushed its first cane in 1882, followed by Rarawai at Ba in 1886, Labasa in 1894 and Lautoka in 1903. By 1914 CSR controlled more than 100,000 acres and dominated the colony's economy and, through it, its politics. Field work was organised by the task system: a measured quantity of cutting, loading or weeding set for the day. Supervision ran through the sirdar, an Indian foreman drawn from among the labourers, who answered to a European overseer. The sirdar controlled tasks, rations and which complaints were heard, and the role is remembered with a mix of resentment and understanding — he was both instrument and subject of the system. CSR left Fiji in 1973; its mills passed to the Fiji Sugar Corporation.

Labourers were housed in barrack rows the colony called lines. A standard barrack held sixteen rooms. A room measured ten feet by seven, later enlarged to ten by twelve. Into that space went three single labourers, or a married couple with up to two children. Many rooms had no window, sometimes no floor, and only wire netting between one family and the next. Privacy was impossible and disease moved easily. Because recruitment brought far more men than women, the lines carried severe social strain, and violence — including violence against women — was documented at the time and became central to the campaigns that ended indenture. Yet the lines were also where people cooked together, sang, kept festivals and buried their dead, and where caste distinctions carried from India loosened because they simply could not be maintained.

Recruitment for Fiji stopped in 1916 and every remaining indenture contract was cancelled on 1 January 1920. Between 1879 and 1916, 42 ships made 87 voyages: 60,965 people boarded in India and 60,553 landed in Fiji. Roughly 25,000 eventually returned; the great majority stayed. Out of many languages — Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali — a common tongue formed on the plantations: Fiji Hindi, also called Fiji Baat, now a distinct language with its own grammar. Ramayan mandali, groups that gather to recite and expound the Ramayana, spread from the 1930s and today number in the hundreds, running charity, disaster relief and cultural work alongside worship. Temples and mosques followed, then schools, farmers' associations and unions. Fiji introduced Girmit Day as a national public holiday in 2023.

On 10 October 1970, ninety-six years to the day after the 1874 Deed of Cession, Fiji became independent. Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, leader of the Alliance Party and head of government in the years leading up to independence, became Fiji's first Prime Minister. He held the office for most of the period to 1987 and later served as President. Fiji remained a Commonwealth realm, with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state represented by a Governor-General — Sir Robert Foster at independence, succeeded in 1973 by Ratu Sir George Cakobau, the first Fijian to hold the post. Independence was negotiated rather than fought for, through constitutional talks in London between iTaukei and Indo-Fijian leaders, and contemporary accounts describe it as achieved in a spirit of cooperation, despite the communal tensions of the late 1960s.

Fiji's national flag was adopted on 10 October 1970. Rather than start fresh, the new nation kept the shape of its colonial ensign and changed its meaning: the dark blue field became light blue for the Pacific Ocean, the Union Flag stayed in the canton, and the shield of the coat of arms was enlarged at the fly. The arms themselves were granted by royal warrant on 4 July 1908. A St George's cross divides the shield into quarters holding sugar cane, a coconut palm, a dove of peace and bananas, with a golden lion holding a cacao pod above. The full arms add two iTaukei warriors as supporters — one with a spear, one with a totokia club — a takia canoe as the crest, and the motto Rerevaka na Kalou ka Doka na Tui: fear God and honour the Monarch. Fiji became a republic in 1987; the arms and motto were retained.

Independence required institutions that could staff and pay for a country. The University of the South Pacific opened on 5 February 1968 at Laucala Bay in Suva, on the site of a former Royal New Zealand Air Force flying-boat base. It is owned jointly by twelve Pacific island countries, with campuses in Fiji, Samoa and Vanuatu and centres across the region — a rare case of Pacific states pooling sovereignty to build something none could afford alone. The Fiji National Provident Fund was established in June 1966 under Ordinance No. 19, starting with a £10,000 government loan; by 30 June 2024 it held $10.6 billion in assets for 423,144 members and had become the country's largest institutional investor. Alongside these, a localised civil service and an expanding school system did the unglamorous work of nation building.

The Bose Levu Vakaturaga, or Great Council of Chiefs, was formed in 1876 and written into the independence settlement, nominating senators and, under later constitutions, appointing the President. Fiji's constitutional order has been interrupted four times. On 14 May 1987 Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka removed the elected government of Prime Minister Timoci Bavadra. Negotiations under Governor-General Ratu Sir Penaia Ganilau produced the Deuba Accord and a bipartisan interim government on 23 September; Rabuka intervened a second time on 25 September, overturning that settlement and the Governor-General's authority. Fiji was declared a republic on 7 October 1987, its Commonwealth membership lapsed, and Ganilau became its first President. On 19 May 2000, George Speight and armed supporters held Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and MPs in Parliament for about 56 days. In December 2006, Commodore Frank Bainimarama removed Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase. Fiji has had four constitutions since independence: 1970, 1990, 1997 and 2013. The 2013 Constitution, signed on 6 September 2013, ended communal electoral rolls and created a single national constituency; elections followed on 17 September 2014. The Council was suspended in 2007, de-established in 2012 and reinstated in May 2023.

Suva became Fiji's capital in 1882, replacing Levuka on Ovalau. At the 2017 Population and Housing Census, Fiji's total population was 884,887, up 5.7 percent on the 837,271 counted in 2007. The Suva urban area held 185,913 people in 2017, with 93,970 inside the city boundary; Lautoka (71,573), Nadi (71,048) and Nausori (57,882) followed. That census recorded 55.9 percent of Fijians — 494,252 people — living in urban areas against 44.1 percent rural, a decisive shift from 50.7 percent urban in 2007. Fiji is young: median age 27.5 years in 2017, with 69 percent of people under 40. UNFPA put Fiji's population at 900,000 in 2025. Rapid growth along the Suva–Nausori corridor has brought informal settlements, housing pressure and flood exposure alongside jobs and education.

Fiji recorded 982,938 visitor arrivals in 2024, a 5.7 percent rise on 2023, then a new peak of 986,367 arrivals in 2025, up 0.3 percent. The Fiji Bureau of Statistics valued tourism earnings at FJD 2,536.8 million in 2024, 1.9 percent above the FJD 2,488.7 million earned in 2023. Direct tourism contributed 13.0 percent of GDP in 2024 — the highest figure in the published series — compared with 12.6 percent in 2023 and 11.8 percent in 2019, and minus 0.2 percent in both 2020 and 2021 when borders were closed. Australia supplied 50.2 percent of tourism earnings in 2024 (FJD 1,272.4 million), ahead of New Zealand (FJD 548.0 million) and the United States (FJD 273.9 million). Direct tourism employment stood at 28,839 in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year published.

Fiji won gold in the inaugural Olympic rugby sevens tournament at Rio 2016, beating Great Britain 43–7 — the first Olympic medal Fiji had ever won in any sport. At the delayed Tokyo 2020 Games, played in 2021, Fiji retained the title with a 27–12 win over New Zealand, then took silver at Paris 2024 after losing the final 28–7 to France. Fiji has also won the Rugby World Cup Sevens three times, in 1997, 2005 and 2022. In the fifteen-a-side game the Flying Fijians beat Australia 22–15 at the 2023 Rugby World Cup — their first win over the Wallabies since 1954 — and lost the quarter-final to England 30–24 in Marseille, peaking at seventh in the world rankings in 2023. The Fijian Drua entered Super Rugby Pacific in 2022, with the Fijiana Drua joining Super W the same year.

Australia holds the largest Fijian community abroad: the 2021 Australian census counted 68,961 Fiji-born residents and 66,043 people claiming Fijian ancestry. The 2020 United States census recorded 54,383 people of Fijian or Rotuman descent. New Zealand's 2018 census counted approximately 62,310 people identified as Fijian New Zealanders, and smaller communities live in Canada and the United Kingdom, many of them Indo-Fijian families who emigrated after the political upheavals from 1987 onwards. Money follows people. The Reserve Bank of Fiji reported personal remittance inflows of FJD 1.019 billion in the year to September 2025, up 4.3 percent on the FJD 977.2 million of the previous year, with Australia, the United States and New Zealand the leading sources. World Bank data put remittances at 8.75 percent of Fiji's GDP in 2023 and 7.11 percent in 2024. Mobile money carried 52.1 percent of inward remittances in 2025, up from 46.8 percent in 2024.

Vunidogoloa in Cakaudrove became the first Fijian village relocated because of climate change, moving about two kilometres inland in January 2014 after repeated seawater flooding of homes and gardens; around 160 residents were resettled. A 2014 government assessment identified 676 coastal communities as needing relocation, of which 42 were expected to move within the decade and 17 were flagged as urgent. Fiji issued the world's first national Planned Relocation Guidelines in 2018, established the Climate Relocation of Communities Trust Fund in 2019 — part-financed from the Environment and Climate Adaptation Levy — and Cabinet endorsed Standard Operating Procedures for planned relocation in 2023. Tropical Cyclone Winston struck in February 2016 as a Category 5 storm, killing 44 people, affecting 540,400 people (62 percent of the population) and damaging or destroying 30,369 homes. Total damage and loss reached FJD 1.99 billion — about one fifth of Fiji's 2014 GDP.

Fiji's Climate Change Act 2021 put an economy-wide net-zero-emissions target for 2050 into legislation, alongside a commitment to designate 30 percent of Fiji's waters as marine protected areas by 2030. Renewables supplied 56.5 percent of Fiji's grid electricity in 2023, dominated by hydropower. The Monasavu scheme in the Nadrau highlands of Viti Levu, commissioned in 1983, has 80 MW of installed capacity and an average annual yield of about 400 GWh; the Nadarivatu scheme, commissioned in September 2012, added 40 MW and roughly 101 GWh a year. Solar carries much of the rest of the country: the 2017 census found 23.9 percent of rural households relying on solar systems against 3.4 percent of urban households. Drought is the weak point — when dam levels fall, Fiji falls back on imported diesel, exposing the cost of an energy system still tied to fossil fuel imports.

The Fijian Government launched the digitalFIJI programme in 2017 to move public services online, delivering platforms including BusinessNOW, a national Data Exchange, the births, deaths and marriages system, the Registrar of Companies portal and myFNPF. The National Digital Strategy 2025–2030 sets targets of ICT reaching 10 percent of GDP, 40,000 new jobs, 250,000 people trained in digital literacy, 1,000 km of domestic optical fibre, 95 percent 4G and 50 percent 5G population coverage, and more than 50 services on a single government portal by 2030 — from a stated baseline of 85.2 percent internet access and 92 percent 4G coverage. On money, the Reserve Bank of Fiji's National Financial Inclusion Strategy 2022–2030 recorded 81 percent of adults using formal financial services in 2020, up from 64 percent in 2014, and targets 90 percent by 2030, with active mobile money use rising from 27 percent to 40 percent.

Fiji's building code had not been substantially revised since 1990. A Joint Task Group of 37 government and industry representatives redrafted the Fiji National Building Code across 2023 and 2024, aligning it with Australian and New Zealand standards and adding climate resilience, disability access and sustainable materials, in support of the Climate Change Act 2021. In January 2024 the Department of National Trade Measurement and Standards convened engineers with James Cook University's Cyclone Testing Station to strengthen wind-load standards; officials noted Fiji's average annual disaster asset loss exceeds FJD 500 million, about 5 percent of GDP. On electricity, the 2017 census counted 191,910 private households nationally, of which 3.7 percent had no electricity at all — a shortfall concentrated almost entirely in rural and maritime communities. The Fiji Rural Electrification Fund, launched in February 2025, aims to mobilise about USD 19.1 million across 2024 to 2028, of which just over USD 7.3 million was secured at launch from the United Kingdom and New Zealand. It targets 2 MW of renewable generation across 20 communities and power for 15 rural schools and health facilities by 2028.