Across the Pacific islands, community isolation has resulted in high human-environment dependency, with climate intrinsically impacting the viability of agricultural systems. However, the resilience of coupled human-environment systems is threatened by long-term stresses and short-term shocks resultant from changes in global climate; with the potential for exceeding system coping capacities resulting in an adverse impact on people’s livelihood security. This research has used the Environmental Livelihood Security (ELS) framework to guide an evaluation of how multifunctional agricultural landscapes could be better managed to optimise sustainable and climate-resilient livelihood outcomes. Initial research has been undertaken in the Ba River catchment in northwest Fiji. A mixed methods approach was adopted involving communities and landscape stakeholders to acquire data. Results indicate complex heterogeneous landscapes where climate information services are lacking adequate communication mechanisms for small-holders to adapt effectively to climate shocks/stresses. Additionally, the quality of information and community adaptation requirements both need to be assessed in further detail. We found that our research participants were especially receptive and engaged with participatory mapping methods. Our research is continuing to build upon these findings to identify how climate information services can better support ELS within the landscape under a changing climate.

Reconceiving the relationship between private property and the environment is a major challenge of our time. Ecological restoration is one construct that is being used to reimagine this relationship. While preferable to more exploitative human-nature relationships, ecological restoration is generally aimed at reinstating pre-1788 habitats, which may be neither desirable nor feasible, and perpetuates an anthroparchic approach to management. Environmental laws may similarly engender maladaptive behaviours, and perverse consequences include frustrated aims, landholder resistance and poor penetration of the broader neo-liberal imperative to maximise profit. This paper critiques the construct of ecological restoration and considers an alternative – reconciliation. We illustrate its potential by drawing upon the stories of landholders whose land use practices are both profitable and place-based. Their approach de-centres the human, and the environment is not an end-point but a relational-material co-becoming. Instead of restoration, there has been reconciliation, between human and nature, and between European agricultural practices and Australian landscapes. The farmscape is the result, and a similar way forward for environmental law is proposed, one that is dynamic, reflexive and place-based, that aims to reconcile humans with nature rather than at humans restoring nature.

National water policy only formally recognised Australia’s First Nations People for the first time in 2004. Over a decade has passed since this recognition, and a long list of position statements, guidelines, and recommendations concerning the need to improve Aboriginal water access have been formulated by Traditional Owners and assorted Federal and State Government water and natural resource management agencies and commissions. Given this activity, it is worth pausing to consider firstly, the current status of Aboriginal water access in Australia and secondly, the justice implications of this positioning. I examine these issues using the State of NSW as a case study. First, I establish the different types of Aboriginal water access in NSW. Observations and encounters with each of these are then described, drawing from recent interviews with informants experienced in Aboriginal water management or policy advocacy at the NSW-regional level or higher. These observations and encounters reveal that Aboriginal water access has improved to some degree in NSW, but obstacles to accessing water, and therefore water justice, remain. I conclude with several, overlapping considerations that are needed if Australia is to address persisting Aboriginal water access injustices, arguing that the solution entails more than simply “just adding water”.