BY LORETTA B MANELE
Social-cultural impacts is one of the impacts from oil spills that doesn’t get much attention especially in economic figures, however it is still important as other impacts.
Sheridan Rabbitt, of Rabbitt Consulting talked about this at the “Strengthening Marine Pollution Incident Resilience in the Pacific Islands” workshop at Heritage Park Hotel last week.
She said “social-cultural impacts are one of those impacts from oil spills on the coastal communities that people don’t think very much about and it varies from country to country.
Rabbitt explained that for instance if there were an oil spill in Brisbane it won’t have that much of a huge impact as compared to coastal communities here in the Solomon Islands.
“Maybe we can’t go to the beach, but it’s a bit annoying, but we can drive somewhere else. It’s going to be quite different in the Pacific Islands context”
She said in the case of an oil spill in the coastal communities, in the short-term people can’t fish because their coastline is unsafe and there are missed opportunities for social connection.
Rabbitt explained that these missed opportunities for social connection can include a group of women who often go out on gleaning trips together or men who go fishing just to hang out with their friends and connect with people in the community.
Relocation of people from one village to another is also another social-cultural impact of oil spills.
Rabbitt said because of this there will also be missed opportunities for people to share their cultural knowledge because people have a deep attachment to their grandparents and parents and their cultural knowledge is passed down from one generation to the next.
“If you remove people from that situation and you’re putting them into another village, that’s not there their land, some of that cultural knowledge is going to be impacted”
Rabbitt mentioned that there will also be a lot of land tenure challenges when people are being moved from one village or community to another.
