Fiji’s new Disaster Risk Management Act: Collective action for lasting impact
September 8, 2026
Author: Seci Burese, Senior Communications & Advocacy Officer, IFRC Pacific seci.burese@ifrc.org
National legislation has a unique power: it sets the rules that apply to everyone, everywhere. In the context of disasters, this means clearer roles, faster decisions, and stronger protection for the entire population. Fiji’s new Disaster Risk Management (DRM) Act represents a collective investment in resilience; one that translates policy reform into real-world impact for communities across the country.
In practical terms, the DRM Act replaces the Natural Disaster Management Act 1998 with a framework built for today’s overlapping hazards. It establishes new coordination mechanisms, formalises a Humanitarian Cluster System, and strengthens accountability. It also mandates multi-hazard early warning systems, underpinned by cross-agency collaboration and partnerships with UN agencies and other stakeholders, and for the first time formally recognises the role of the private sector in disaster risk management.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), through its Disaster Law programme, has played a long-standing role in supporting legislative reform across the Pacific, including in Fiji. This support has focused on working alongside national authorities and Red Cross National Societies to strengthen legal frameworks so that they are practical, inclusive, and fit for purpose. In Fiji, this meant providing technical advice, comparative legal insights, and facilitation support throughout the reform process, always grounded in national leadership and priorities. The Fiji Red Cross Society (FRCS) brings another important asset: reach. Its longstanding relationships with communities and public authorities ensure that policy discussions relate to practical experience from the communities that DRM systems ultimately need to serve.
The real significance of the Fiji DRM Act lies not only in its passage, but in what it enables. By clarifying institutional roles, strengthening coordination mechanisms, and embedding a whole-of-society approach to disaster risk management, the legislation provides a foundation for more predictable, inclusive, and effective action. It creates the conditions for earlier decision-making, better preparedness, and clearer accountability; which can directly affect how quickly assistance reaches people and how well communities are supported through recovery.
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“The enactment of the new Disaster Risk Management Act marks a critical step forward for Fiji’s disaster risk governance. It provides a modern legal framework that strengthens coordination, clarifies responsibilities, and places greater emphasis on managing risk before disasters occur. In the context of increasing climate and disaster impacts, this legislation embeds preparedness, early action and inclusive decision-making in law, helping to safeguard lives, livelihoods and long-term development.”
Ernest Gibson, Disaster Law Focal Point
This kind of reform does not happen overnight, nor does it happen in isolation. It is the product of sustained engagement, trust, and technical collaboration over many years.
This groundwork was underway long before the Act’s passage. In 2020, Vasiti Soko, then Director of the National Disaster Risk Management Office (NDRMO) was already pointing to the need for Fiji’s disaster laws to keep pace with increasingly complex, overlapping crises, stressing that innovative approaches were essential to safeguard communities’ safety and wellbeing. The current NDRMO Director Napolioni Boseiwaqa, has described the Act’s passage as deepening the country’s commitment to “reform, readiness, and resilience,” anchored, he said, in Fiji’s lived experience of disaster and a shared vision to leave no one behind.
This long-term engagement matters because strong disaster risk governance is built on sustained relationships as much as regulations. Rather than starting from scratch, the reform process could draw on social, political, and institutional relationships built over many years. The result is legislation that reflects international good practice while responding to Fiji’s own experience and context.
This philosophy of building on what already exists is also reflected in how climate resilience programming is being delivered by the IFRC and Fiji Red Cross in Fiji, through the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance. The Alliance programme was designed not as a standalone intervention, but to connect with and strengthen the work already underway across Fiji and the wider Pacific.
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The Alliance programme builds on the credibility and relationships established through IFRC, FRCS and other partners, while aligning climate resilience activities with national priorities and connecting community-level action with broader systems and policy change. For example, Alliance-supported work with communities to strengthen preparedness, understand local risks and improve access to and use of early warnings directly contributes to priorities reflected in Fiji’s wider DRM and early warning agendas. Rather than creating parallel structures, this approach allows local experience, technical expertise and national systems to reinforce one another.
This is where collective action becomes particularly clear. Major changes such as the DRM Act are rarely the result of a single intervention or organisation. They emerge when different strands of work, some developed over years or even decades, come together at the right time. Long term relationships create trust and access. Technical expertise supports quality and coherence. National leadership provides direction and ownership. Regional initiatives create momentum and importantly, long-term, strategic funding can help connect and accelerate these efforts.
The Alliance approach is therefore about more than delivering individual activities. It is about recognising where momentum already exists, finding opportunities to contribute to it, and connecting efforts across communities, institutions and countries. In this way, each achievement in the programme can help strengthen the foundations for what comes next in the country. Fiji’s new Disaster Risk Management Act now provides a stronger foundation for the next phase of action, creating a stronger platform for continued collaboration, investment and action to strengthen national resilience.
Through the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance, investment is now helping to pave the way as momentum shifts from legislative reform to practical implementation, supporting systems strengthening, deepening partnerships and enhancing community-level action, all needed to turn the ambitions of the Act into lasting resilience.
