The comment by Hall and Sanders raises some issues we are able to clarify. These authors also criticize our study for its omissions, something we regard as inevitable in a one-off study of this nature. We contend that neither of these concerns invalidate our study's conclusions. Hall and Sanders's first criticism concerns sampling and interpretation and is prefaced by the rhetorical question "of whom can the authors legitimately speak?" At the time of the study, both authors had interacted with both communities in the Rewa Delta for more than 20 years, each author speaking one of their two vernacular languages (Fiji Hindi and Bauan-Fijian) and being intimate with their cultural mores, attributes that allowed us privileged access to these communities for the purpose of the study. Interviewee selection was not "haphazard". In both study sites, we were constrained in this by gender, age, language, relatedness, status, and religious affiliation, all of which affected our ability to freely speak to those we might have targeted had we not been so encumbered yet we are satisfied that the 64 people we interviewed (selected by age, gender and residence time) represented a cross-section of the target population in each community. Full details of interviewees are given in Lata's MSc thesis (Lata 2010), which was referenced several times in our paper (Lata and Nunn 2012). We are indeed somewhat "startled" that Hall and Sanders overlooked this. A requirement that potential interviewees must have been continuously resident in our sample locations for 30 years is not "troubling" to us. We used a 30-year figure because (1) our experience of gathering environmental-change data from Pacific Island communities suggests that this was the optimal period needed to comprehensively exclude persons who might give misleading information2 and (2) flood data in particular suggest that this is the period within which recent climate-change effects are detectable, something on which we sought to allow our informants to comment. As we explain in our paper, "although the specific data analysed in this paper were obtained from individual interviews, these were supplemented by focus-group discussions in appropriate cultural situations for the purposes of understanding both the broader context and canvassing group views" (Lata and Nunn 2012: 174).

Pacific Island Countries are highly exposed to climate change. Most impact studies have focused on the most densely populated core areas where top-down governance is most effective. In contrast, this research looks at peripheral (rural/outer-island) communities where long-established systems of environmental governance exist that contrast markedly with those which governments and their donor partners in this region favour. Peripheral communities in the Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, and Vanuatu were studied. Traditional systems of environmental governance are described, and three common barriers to effective and sustainable climate-change adaptation identified. The first is lack of awareness among key community decision makers about climate change and associated environmental sustainability that could be lessened by targeted awareness raising. The second is the inappropriateness of traditional decision-making structures for dealing with both the complexity and pace of climate-driven environmental changes. The third is the short-term views of resource management and sustainability held by many community decision makers. Despite 30 years of assistance, there has been negligible effective and sustainable adaptation for climate change in peripheral parts of Pacific Island Countries, something that is explicable by both the ineffectiveness of top-down approaches in such places as well as a lack of attention to the nature and the context of adaptation communications. It is timely for interventions to be made at community level where the greatest disconnect lies between the science and stakeholder awareness of climate change.

While increasing research is focusing on the effective adaptation to climate change in richer (developed) countries, comparatively little has focused specifically on this subject in poorer (developing) countries such as most in the Pacific Islands region. A significant barrier to the development of effective and sustainable adaptive strategies for climate change in such places is the gap between risk and perceived risk. This study looks at a vulnerable location in Fiji - the densely populated Rewa River Delta where environmental changes resulting from shoreline retreat and floods are expected to increase over the next few decades and entail profound societal disruption. The numbers of people living in the Rewa Delta who know of climate change and could correctly identify its contributory causes are few although many rank its current manifestations (floods, riverbank erosion, groundwater salinization) as among their most serious environmental challenges. While lack of awareness is a barrier to adaptation, there are also cultural impediments to this such as short-term planning perspectives, spiritual beliefs, traditional governance structures. One way forward is to empower community leaders in places like the Rewa Delta to make appropriate decisions and for regional governments to continue working together to find solutions that acknowledge the variation in sub-regional trans-national vulnerability to climate change.