CEPF Ecosystem Profile- East Melanesian Island Biodiversity Hotspots

The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) is designed to safeguard the world’s biologically richest and most threatened regions, known as biodiversity hotspots.

This document is the ecosystem profile for the East Melanesian Islands Hotspot, which includes the island nations of Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands and the islands region of Papua New Guinea (PNG), which includes the provinces of Manus, New Ireland, East New Britain and West New Britain plus the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. The East Melanesian Islands qualify as a hotspot due to their high levels of plant and animal endemism and accelerating levels of habitat loss, caused chiefly by widespread commercial logging and mining, expansion of subsistence and plantation agriculture, population increase, and the impacts of climate change and variability