Climate change is usually framed as a weather story – stronger cyclones, rising seas, and flooded villages. But in Vanuatu, one of the most disaster-prone nations on Earth, it is also a culture story. Culture is not abstract; it is anchored in specific land, seasons, and ecosystems. When those physical foundations shift, the traditions built on them shift too.
Vanuatu is a small archipelago of 80 islands in the South Pacific with a remarkable cultural density. It holds over 100 Indigenous languages, one of the highest language densities in the world, and a deep-rooted system of Kastom: the customs, knowledge, and governance practices that shape how communities live. Kastom is not a museum piece. It is how knowledge gets passed down, how communities make decisions, and how identity is held across generations. It is tied to the land, the sea, and the seasonal rhythms that the Ni-Vanuatu (the Indigenous peoples of Vanuatu, regardless of differences in local cultural and linguistic groups) people have read and lived by for centuries.
The dramatic disasters get the headlines while the quieter damage happens beneath the headlines. Cyclones like Pam and Harold flatten villages and destroy gardens, and the damage reaches the culture itself. After cyclone Pam in 2015, UNESCO found significant damage to Vanuatu’s cultural resources, including the national treasure of the Malvatumauri chief’s nakamal, the traditional meeting house used for decision-making, teaching, and dispute resolution, and to the country’s only World Heritage site, the cultural landscape of Chief Roi Mata’s Domain on Efate, Lelepa, and Artok. Tellingly, the traditional nakamals built with local materials and customary skills survived the cyclone better than those built with imported materials – evidence that the knowledge itself is a form of resilience.
Climate change erodes the customary land these traditions occupy and invalidates the ecological wisdom that older generations accumulated. For generations, the Ni-Vanuatu forecast storms by reading the natural world: a yellow oriental paper wasp nesting lower than usual, Pacific emerald doves laying eggs on the ground, the fruiting of mango trees. Elders now report that some indicators no longer work because rising temperatures and shifting rainfall have disrupted the breeding and fruiting cycles that the signs depend on. When the markers used to predict seasons and cyclones no longer behave as they did, the knowledge built on them loses its footing.
Displacement severs the same connection. In 2005, around 100 villagers of Lateu on Tegua Island were moved inland. They are among the first communities formally relocated because of climate change, after king tides flooded the village four or five times a year and erosion ate away two to three metres of coastline annually.
Relocation saves lives, but the ceremonies held on ancestral ground do not transfer completely, and the knowledge tied to a specific plot of land does not travel with the people who leave it. It is worth noting that researchers have since debated whether the Lateu move was driven by climate change or by local tectonic shifts, so the example should be read with that nuance in mind.[1]
Vanuatu’s cultural traditions are not dying out. On Malekula (the second largest island in Vanuatu), communities run kastom schools to pass traditional ecological knowledge to the next generation – a deliberate, creative response to the pressures on that knowledge.[2] Culture is an evolving thing, and Ni-Vanuatu communities evolve.
But adaptation comes at a price, and there is a real difference between a tradition changing because a community chose to change it and a tradition degrading because the environment changed too quickly for anyone to respond. The pressure is generational as well as environmental: nearly 60 percent of Ni-Vanuatu are under 24, and younger people increasingly spend their time away from villages and elders.[3]
The question is not whether Vanuatu’s traditions will survive. They will, in some form, because they are alive and adaptive. The question is which parts survive intact, and which parts are lost in the gap between how fast the environment changes and how fast a culture can transmit what it knows. This is why climate change is not only an environmental crisis in Vanuatu, but a cultural one, and why the rest of the world should be paying attention. If a culture this deeply rooted in place is straining under the pace of change, the same pressures are coming for traditions everywhere else.
[1] Patricia Siméoni and Valérie Ballu, “The Myth of the ‘First Climate Refugees’: Population Movement and Environmental Changes in the Torres Islands (Vanuatu, Melanesia).” Annales de géographie 685 (2012): 219–41.
[2] Joe McCarter and Michael C. Gavin, “In Situ Maintenance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge on Malekula Island, Vanuatu.” Society & Natural Resources 27, no. 11 (2014): 1115–29.
[3] United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), State of Pacific Youth in Vanuatu (Suva, Fiji: UNFPA Pacific Sub-Regional Office).
*Cover image: A nakamal in the village of Pango on Efate, Vanuatu. The nakamal is a traditional meeting house where communities come together to make decisions, teach, and settle disputes. April 2008, photo by Philip Capper via Wikimedia commons licensed under CC BY 2.0.
[Cover image description: Traditional nakamal with steep thatched roof and open sides supported by timber in a village clearing with thick tropical vegetation in bright daylight.]
