Country

Vanuatu: one ecoregion. Each with its climate now and toward 2050, and its conservation tier.

Vanuatu's archipelago sits wholly within the Vanuatu rain forests, an Australasian tropical moist broadleaf forest ecoregion of about 5,100 square miles spread along the island chain. The climate is warm, humid, and oceanic year-round, wetter on windward slopes and toward the north, with cyclones the defining periodic disturbance; the forests themselves range from coastal and lowland rain forest up into cloudier ridge forest on the higher volcanic islands. For growers this is generous wet-tropics territory on fertile volcanic soils, where the humid-tropical palette thrives, tempered by the need for wind-resilient plantings and quick recovery after storms. The ecoregion rates Nature Could Reach Half Protected, and much of the islands' character still comes from that standing native forest.