People should embrace their local knowledge to help conserve and manage their resources in and around Fiji.

This was highlighted by Wildlife Conservation Society Fiji Director Dr. Stacey Jupiter who has been recently recognized for her efforts in working with people in villages and communities in Fiji to manage their resources.

Jupiter has been named the 2019 MacArthur Fellow Award winner.

Known as the genius grant, the fellowship honors extraordinary originality and comes with a no-strings-attached grant of $625,000, to be distributed over five years.

Dr. Jupiter has been living in Fiji for 12 years and joined WCS to help design how they could help local communities to better manage their resources.

“They should embrace the local knowledge that people have in terms of their connection with their place, their home, the land and the sea that they call their own and look after. We harness that and also introduced them to the consequences of a number of different impacts that different activities that people are doing in the land and the sea can have on the resources that people of Fiji care about for our cultural practice.”

Dr. Stacy Jupiter has now been appointed the Wildlife Conservation Society Director of the Melanesia Regional Program in the Pacific with a focus on Fiji, Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea.