Vanuatu

The Vanuatu that international travelers once pictured — eighty-three islands strung across the southwest Pacific, smoking volcanoes on Tanna and Ambrym, the world's most accessible large wreck dive on the SS President Coolidge, the vine-rope land-diving of south Pentecost, and a population repeatedly crowned the happiest on the planet — is still mostly intact in 2026. But it has been weathered, hard, by a cascade of shocks: Cyclone Pam in 2015, Cyclone Harold in 2020 paired with the border closures of COVID-19, the twin Category-4 cyclones Judy and Kevin in 2023, the collapse and reconstitution of the national airline in 2024, and a magnitude 7.3 earthquake that struck just outside Port Vila in December of that same year. Tourism, which once contributed somewhere around a third of GDP in receipts alone and up to roughly forty-five percent counting indirect contributions, collapsed below ten percent of GDP in 2020 and has since rebuilt unevenly, leaning heavily on cruise ships and Australian visitors. The sector is more fragile than it was a decade ago. It is also, paradoxically, more strategically positioned than ever.

The reason is climate diplomacy. Vanuatu's most globally visible export by the mid-2020s is no longer kava or copra or even tourism itself; it is moral and legal leadership on climate change. The country championed a 2023 UN General Assembly resolution that sent the question of state climate obligations to the International Court of Justice, and on 23 July 2025 the Court issued a unanimous advisory opinion finding that states have a legal duty to protect the climate system, with the 1.5°C target treated as legally binding under the Paris Agreement and fossil-fuel licensing potentially constituting an internationally wrongful act. Vanuatu now holds a rotating small-island seat on the board of the Loss and Damage Fund and has launched one of the first national Loss and Damage policies in the world. This is the asset, intangible but increasingly bankable, that will shape its tourism economy across the rest of the century.

The physical environment that awaits visitors in 2100 will be substantially altered. Central projections place sea-level rise for Vanuatu around half a metre under a middle-of-the-road emissions pathway and around four-fifths of a metre under a high-emissions scenario, with substantial uncertainty bands around those numbers. Local conditions amplify the rise in places: tide gauges in Port Vila show subsidence of nearly five millimetres a year, while other parts of the archipelago are being tectonically lifted. Tropical cyclones across the southwest Pacific are projected to become fewer but more intense, with higher peak winds, more rapid intensification, and heavier rainfall, so the Pam-Harold-Judy-Kevin cadence of recent years is consistent with what is to come. Coral reefs, the foundation of the dive-tourism brand, face severe annual bleaching becoming a near-certain event across much of the Pacific between roughly 2040 and 2070 under realistic emissions trajectories, compounded by acidifying seas and crown-of-thorns outbreaks already documented in Vanuatu's protected areas. Volcanoes, by contrast, are immune to all of this; Yasur, Marum, Benbow, Lopevi and Gaua sit on the Pacific Ring of Fire and will keep glowing on geological timescales. They will, almost by default, become the most central attraction Vanuatu has.

Demographically, the country is on a path to nearly triple in population by the end of the century, from roughly 335,000 today toward something in the range of 875,000 to 883,000 under medium-variant UN projections. Median age rises from around twenty to the mid-thirties, life expectancy approaches the early eighties, and urbanisation crosses fifty percent well before mid-century, with Port Vila plausibly hosting between 150,000 and 200,000 residents by 2100. At the same time, labor mobility is partly decoupling demographics from the local economy. More than eleven thousand Ni-Vanuatu now work in Australia under the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme — the largest cohort from any participating country — and a new Australian Pacific Engagement Visa offers a small annual lottery of permanent-residency places. A growing diaspora is becoming one of the most consequential pillars of resilient development, sustaining remittance flows, soft power and cultural exchange.

Tourism in 2100 will, on the most likely trajectory, look bifurcated. One layer will be a smaller, higher-yield segment built around volcano lodges on Tanna, naghol land-diving packages on Pentecost during the yam harvest, cultural circuits anchored by Chief Roi Mata's Domain (the country's sole UNESCO inscription), kastom homestays across Malekula and Ambrym, and small-ship expedition cruising through the Banks and Torres groups. The other will be a higher-volume Australian and New Zealand regional market focused on Efate's reshaped coastline and on Espiritu Santo's blue holes and wreck dives, where the Coolidge — already shifted by recent earthquakes — will remain a marquee draw if conservation efforts hold. Mass cruise tourism, which surged in the early 2020s to the point where day-visitors sometimes accounted for the great majority of monthly arrivals, looks likely to be pared back by carbon pricing of bunker fuel, IMO regulation, and reputational pressure in the post-ICJ era. A distinct sub-segment of climate-witness travel is likely to emerge — visits to relocated coastal communities, bleached-reef interpretation centres, and perhaps a national climate-justice memorial — turning Vanuatu's moral leadership into a destination experience.

Underpinning all of this will be artificial intelligence, integrated unevenly but consequentially. Computer-vision coral surveys, AI-augmented reef monitoring, and machine-learning-guided coral gardening can extend the viability of dive sites that would otherwise be lost. AI-driven cyclone-track and storm-surge forecasting can save lives. Multilingual real-time interpretation can make cultural tourism more accessible. Speech models, developed in partnership with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, can help preserve indigenous languages spoken by fewer people each generation. Against these benefits sit real risks: displacement of front-line tourism jobs disproportionately held by women and youth, extraction of margin by foreign booking and review platforms, unauthorised AI-generated "kastom experiences" circulating without community consent, and reinsurers using improved climate models to reprice Vanuatu's risk in ways that raise premiums and shrink credit access even where adaptation has improved. How these forces balance is genuinely uncertain.

What does seem reasonably certain is the shape of the destination at the end of the century. Vanuatu will still be inhabited, sovereign, and culturally distinct. Article 73 of the Constitution, which keeps all land customarily owned and restricts foreign tenure to leases of up to seventy-five years, will continue to slow speculative development while preserving the negotiating power of chiefs and clans. Bislama will remain the national lingua franca, with English and French alongside it and many indigenous tongues preserved in archives even where daily speakers thin out. The beaches that anchored the 2010s brochure will have shifted or, in places, been quietly given back to the sea through managed retreat. The volcanoes, the wreck, the land-divers and Roi Mata's tabu sites will still be there. And so, in all likelihood, will the role Vanuatu has carved for itself as the small island state that taught international law how to take a warming planet seriously — a role that may, by 2100, be the most enduring attraction of all.