Why Cultural Security is Key for Climate Security: Insights from the Pacific and the Maldives

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This paper draws from the knowledges and experiences of communities across Fiji and the Maldives to highlight that the most enduring forms of climate security are those already embedded in cultural practices. Cultural security thus helps reframe climate security and adaptation from ‘fixing risk’ and ‘reducing vulnerability’ to maintaining meaningful ways of being under increasingly uncertain conditions. As illustrated across Fiji and the Maldives, cultural security provides critical peacebuilding mechanisms by strengthening social cohesion, supporting conflict resolution, and enabling collective responses to climate change. Most importantly, cultural security reminds us to build on the already existing strategies, systems. and knowledge that have long guided communities and continues to do so into uncertain futures.