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The Afulilo Hydro Power Augmentation Project was designed specifically to assist with the Upolu power system stability. Demand for energy has been growing in line with growth in maximum demand and, while the Afulilo scheme is producing more energy than anticipated, the sustainable energy outflow of the present scheme is limited by water inflows, reservoir storage volume and installed generation capacity. Because the Afulilo scheme is the only hydro scheme in Samoa with carry over storage, augmentation of the Afulilo scheme is paticularly important to increase dry season capacity to reduce the amount of installed diesel capacity to reduce overall fuel consumption and to lessen the dry season peak in fuel consumption.

Coral atolls are natural laboratories within which to examine ecological processes (Sachet, 1967; Lee, 1984). They are often isolated, in some cases little disturbed, and have a geologically recent history of terrestrial plant colonisation. Reef islands around the rim of most atolls are Holocene in age. They are composed of biogenic skeletal sediments and have developed since reef growth caught up with sea level which stabilized after post-glacial sea-level rise. Plant colonisation of most of these islands must have occurred over a period of no more than 6000 years.