Samoa's architects look to the past to boost climate resilience

APIA, Samoa In many Pacific Island countries, Western-style home construction has been gradually usurping traditional architecture. But returning to indigenous practices of building and planning communities could be key to creating the disaster-resilient communities of the future, experts say.

In the Samoan community of Saanapu, for instance, local people, working with architects and environmental experts, are designing a new community center that will blend aspects of traditional Samoan architecture with solar energy, water tanks and the capacity to shelter up to 200 people for three weeks in the event of a disaster.

At the new center, it will be very easy for the village to come together and have a meeting and solve any problem, and it will be passed on that way to the next generation, said Popese Leaana, the traditional orator of Sa'anapu.

In Samoa, 70 percent of the South Pacific island states population of 190,372 people lives in low-lying coastal villages, many of which face high risks of devastation bygale-force winds, flooding, sea surges, and tsunamis.

In Saanapu, a village of 2,000 people on the south coast of the main Upolu island, abandoned dwellings scatter the foreshore, bearing witness to the ferocity of an 8.1 magnitude undersea earthquake and tsunami in 2009. Across the country 5,000 people and 850 households were affected by the disaster, including 25 homes in Saanapu.

Three years later island communities were again ravaged by severe Cyclone Evan, which hit during Samoas November to April tropical cyclone season.

Experts predict things could get worse. According to the Pacific Climate Change Science Program, wind speeds of Pacific cyclones are expected to increase 11 percent this century, while rainfall intensity will go up 20 percent.

People here have to live with [disasters] and [previously] they built their houses accordingly, so we need to learn from the past and offer new solutions to improve things for the future, urged Samoan architecture graduate Carinnya Feaunati.

For centuries, she said, the Polynesian people of Samoa have built structures appropriate to the climate and put them in locations to maximize social cohesion and effective governance attributes especially important in times of crisis.

Traditional architecture is epitomized by the fale, an oval-shaped open structure with timber posts supporting a steep domed roof. All of the building elements are "lashed" or bound together, originally with a plaited rope made from dried coconut fiber.

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Samoa's architects look to the past to boost climate resilience