Efforts are underway in Fiji to help communities power their homes and fertilise their crops with nuisance seaweed.
It's hoped the University of the South Pacific project would mean an end to crops being fertilised by polluting chemicals partly responsible for the increasing seaweed affecting beaches in the west.
The USP's Antoine N'Yeurt says blooms of seaweed fed by pollutants and a warming ocean have been annoying tourist operators and local communities.
"Operators have been spending a lot of effort and money hauling this seaweed away by barge or burying it which is very labour intensive and not really sustainable so we came up with this solution for them to use this as a source of biomass for making biofuel or fertiliser."
Dr N'Yeurt says the project is working on educational material and household machines for local people to transform the seaweed into green energy and compost.
