Why Is Tetepare the South Pacific’s Largest Uninhabited Island?

Descendants of the island’s former inhabitants struggle to balance environmental conservation with sustaining their community’s livelihoods

Zach Theiler

August 25, 2025 8:00 a.m.

Roughly two decades ago, a group of scientists embarked to Tetepare, a remote island in the southwestern corner of the Solomon Islands, to study its ecology. They knew that this particular island, whose evergreen hills rise from the choppy Pacific Ocean, is a refuge for a wide variety of endangered animals. Leatherback sea turtles nest on its black-sand shores. Dugongs feed on meadows of seagrass that flow out from its coastline. Old-growth rainforest covers much of its 46 square miles of rugged terrain, offering pristine habitat for endemic birds like Tetepare white-eyes and Sanford’s sea eagles. But it was the local population of coconut crabs that hooked the researchers’ attention.

Coconut crabs are famously giant, growing up to three feet across and weighing up to ten pounds. But while studying these creatures, the scientists found that the coconut crabs on Tetepare were even larger than those found elsewhere in the Solomon Islands—a country of around a thousand islands situated northeast of Australia. A key reason for this, they discovered, was due to the lack of human contact, and the harvesting that often comes with it.

Besides two short-lived coconut plantations, Tetepare hasn’t held a permanent human settlement for most of the past 160 years. Today, the island hosts a research station and an ecolodge with occasional staff and tourists, but with no permanent residents. As a result, Tetepare lays claim as the largest uninhabited island in the South Pacific, and the wildlife continues to live undisturbed by hunting and most other human activity. But this was not always the case. The history of Tetepare’s native people is shrouded in ambiguity, and keeping the island mostly untouched has been an ongoing struggle.

The people of Tetepare, who are a distinct ethnic group with their own unique (and today mostly extinct) language, abandoned their ancestral land for mysterious reasons more than a century and a half ago. Over the years, various stories took root within the community of displaced descendants to explain the loss of their homeland. Some believe the exodus was caused by the curse of a sea devil. Others believe disease swept through the island. But oral tradition also suggests brutal headhunting raids drove them away.

“They lived in fear of headhunting,” says Mary Bea, a descendant of Tetepare and co-founder of the Tetepare Descendants’ Association. She explains the headhunters had little regard for human life: “It’s just like playing soccer somewhere,” she says. “They came for trophies: a lot of heads.”

As the story goes, the raids became so severe that only a handful of women managed to escape in dugout canoes, paddling away to nearby islands. There they found refuge and started families—ensuring the survival of their people. Today, nearly 4,000 individuals are officially registered with the Tetepare Descendants’ Association, but many more descendants are scattered throughout the Solomon Islands, Bea says.

Since the mysterious exodus, Tetepare has remained uninhabited, despite its massive size, fertile soil, freshwater sources and abundance of valuable natural resources. According to Bea, this is because the spirits of her ancestors wish for the island to remain abandoned.

“We call it the spirit of this island. They’re alive, and they can hear, and they can make decisions,” she says. Those who step foot on the island experience a surreal sensation, according to Bea. “You cannot stay more than three days,” she adds, “without feeling that push to leave.”

Instead of living on the island, many descendants are taught to connect to their ancestral home, spiritually, starting from a young age. When Bea was a young girl, her parents taught her to communicate with her ancestors, who are believed to remain on Tetepare, through rituals, prayers and storytelling. Today, she teaches young descendants these same traditions. “Our inheritance in our blood is strong,” she says.

But the physical separation from Tetepare has made many nervous that an outside group could seek to claim it. Today, descendants live mostly scattered across the Western Province of the Solomon Islands, which includes Tetepare. Rendova Island, where Bea spent her childhood, is nearest to Tetepare, separated by about a mile and a half of ocean at its closest point, though many communities lie much farther away. Traversing the open ocean by canoe or motorized boat, the most common means of transport across the archipelago, can be dangerous. As a result, some descendants, especially those living far away, rarely have the chance to visit their ancestral home. Bea, for example, first stepped foot on Tetepare as an adult after her deepest fear became a reality: A logging company sought to plunder Tetepare’s forests.

The temptation to log

Wilko Bosma, a forestry expert from the Netherlands, came to the Solomon Islands nearly 30 years ago as the timber industry boomed, during which time he founded the Natural Resources Development Foundation to promote sustainable forest management. At the time, international logging companies turned their sights on the Solomons for its abundance of untouched lowland rainforest with high-value hardwood trees such as fuchsia, dillenia and calophyllum.

The logging industry quickly spiraled out of control, fueled by supportive government policies and high demand for hardwood timber in neighboring Asian markets. But by the 1990s, timber harvest more than doubled over what were deemed sustainable levels, leading some analysts to predict in 2005 that forests would be depleted in just 15 years.

Bosma describes how the logging companies stripped the forests bare of all kinds of trees, not just approved hardwood species but even protected species like rosewood, to satiate the market demands. Although the Solomon Islands have a code of logging practice, logging companies ignored these rules, he says.

“They know that the government has problems to enforce and to monitor,” Bosma says, which stem from budget constraints and lack of staffing. As a result, the environmental damage is massive.

While deforestation is the obvious effect, erosion and pollution runoff from logging activity also have disastrous effects on surrounding reefs. The soil and pollution smother corals and slowly kill ocean habitat, like the seagrass that dugongs depend on. Meanwhile, clearing trees wipes out the habitat for animals like the Tetepare white-eyes; coconut crabs, which are vulnerable to extinction; and saltwater crocodiles that nest among coastal mangroves.

Witnessing the ecological fallout of logging had a lasting impact on Bea as a young woman growing up on nearby Rendova Island. “Logging has destroyed our lifestyles,” she says. The majority of Solomon Islanders are dependent on subsistence agriculture and hunting. She describes how the loss of forest cover pushed bush-dwelling animals, like wild boars, into communities where they would eat plants in gardens, while the pollution wrecked surrounding marine ecosystems that locals depended on for fish.

But over the decades many Solomon Islanders have invited logging companies to harvest their lands due to the financial incentives they offer, Bosma explains. This sometimes includes a cash advance, which usually falls into the hands of corrupt middlemen. Bosma notes that communities often receive royalty payments, but the percentage is small, and payments usually run dry after a year or two—following the shipment of all the timber harvest.

In a country where around a quarter of the population lives under the international poverty line, these financial incentives, however dubious, can be enticing.

According to Bea, at the peak of the logging boom, in the early 1990s, a group of descendants from Tetepare met with an international logging company and offered up their ancestral land to harvest, with the idea to resettle it after it had been plundered. But Bea and a group of like-minded descendants caught wind of the plan and intervened, leveraging traditional landowning rights to block the process.

The intervention earned her a few enemies, but she had a different vision for Tetepare that she hoped could satisfy economic demands while conserving nature: opening up the island as an ecotourism paradise.

With support from descendants who wished to protect Tetepare and international environmental nonprofits, such as the World Wildlife Fund, Bea was able to co-found the Tetepare Descendants’ Association and launch a research station and an ecolodge to host wildlife rangers and tourists on the island. Small groups of visitors stay on the island to experience the untouched wild. Meanwhile, the association is headquartered on Munda, a town in the Western Province about an hour and a half commute by speedboat away from Tetepare, and only essential staff members travel to the island to support tourists and conservation programs; none lives there permanently.

For over 25 years, Tetepare has remained a wildlife refuge while many other islands have been stripped of their forests. The association’s conservation team says that while coconut crabs and saltwater crocodiles are rare across the archipelago, they are relatively abundant on Tetepare. Today, the rugged coastline hosts nesting colonies of leatherback, green and hawksbill sea turtles, all of which are vulnerable or endangered. In 2019, a group of scientists camped out near the swift waters of the Tongorongo River, which weaves through Tetepare, and documented six frog, reptile and mammal species for the first time.

“By protecting nature, you protect the ancestors,” says Bea. According to her, the spirits of their ancestors are directly tied to the land upon which they once lived. When the land, including its wildlife, is protected, so are their spirits.

Meanwhile, the proceeds of the ecolodge, as well as other funds raised by the association, are used to support economic and educational initiatives for the descendants, including business training and a scholarship program available to young descendants. Rangers, paid by the association, patrol the island to thwart poachers, as well as to monitor, tag and collect data on wildlife, but the workers live on other nearby islands. Overall, the association has created dozens of jobs.

But despite these successes, the economic pressures of modern life in the Solomon Islands, one of the lowest-income countries of the South Pacific, have led to clashes among some of the descendants who still aren’t convinced of the immediate benefits of ecotourism.

The demands of modern life

One night ten years ago, a group of the association’s wildlife rangers confronted a band of poachers while patrolling the waters off Tetepare’s coastline. The poachers were possibly seeking trochuses, sea snails whose shells are used in jewelry and fetch a decent price at local markets.

Fishing off Tetepare is tightly protected by the descendants’ association, and the confrontation quickly escalated, culminating in a challenge to fight on the beach. As the story goes, during the standoff, the sound of thunder and lightning came from the surrounding rainforest, and the poachers fled, believing the spirits of their ancestors were displeased by their actions.

Bea explains that she was watching over the ecolodge at the time of this incident. Later that night, the poachers turned themselves in. Instead of punishing them, Bea educated them on the values of conservation and eventually hired them to work for the association. But not all rural Solomon Islanders are so lucky to find employment.

“In the rural area there’s very little formal employment,” says Katherine Passmore, an economist at the Asian Development Bank who works on the Solomon Islands. Though she sees potential in tourism as an industry, because of the Solomons’ remote nature, high utility costs and limited infrastructure, it is currently a niche market most likely to attract intrepid backpackers.

“The kind of tourism you could do in the Solomon Islands is very, very different to what you can do in other countries in the Pacific,” Passmore says. “It has one of the highest costs of electricity in the world,” she adds, which makes comforts like air conditioning difficult to provide.

According to government databases, only 6,297 visitors to the Solomon Islands indicated their travel was for vacation purposes in 2023. (For comparison, 776,784 tourists visited nearby Fiji that year.) Even then, only a small percent of tourists in the Solomon Islands visit the far-flung corners, like Tetepare, which generally requires a combination of domestic flight and boat to reach when traveling from the capital, Honiara.

Meanwhile, Bea continues to struggle to convince the community of descendants of the immediate benefits of ecotourism. “The demands of modern life [are] too big,” she says. “Money makes them go against what they believe.”

While the ecolodge is ongoing, Bea pins her hopes on a new conservation model that could infuse further income into her community and alleviate some of the economic pressure: carbon credits. But the carbon credit system is complex and controversial among environmental groups.

The carbon credit dilemma

Today, Bosma works for environmental groups, including Nakau, a nonprofit that promotes forest conservation carbon credit models in the Solomon Islands. One of its success stories is Choiseul Island, where the local landowners conserve their forest and sell the carbon credits calculated by this program to an international market. The project provides the community with annual payments through 2045, when the contract will come up for renewal.

In essence, Bosma explains, carbon credits are calculated by comparing the carbon dioxide emissions that would result if a plot of land would be logged as opposed to if it is conserved. One ton of carbon emissions avoided awards one carbon credit, which can be sold to companies around the world. The companies that purchase these credits then factor them into their own environmental footprint, claiming that the credits offset their carbon emissions.

Critics argue that the methodology used to calculate the offset can be inaccurate and misleading, allowing polluting companies to continue their emissions while claiming carbon neutrality. But Bosma argues that many companies are genuinely cutting emissions and purchasing carbon credits as part of their plan, while the sales of carbon credits offer local communities a rare opportunity to conserve their forests while also generating income.

Yet, the process to qualify and apply for a carbon credit program is bureaucratic and can take years to finalize, explains Bosma. To begin, the land must have guaranteed protections under law—a complicated process in the Solomon Islands guided by traditional landowning customs. The project is then inspected by an international auditor before it is approved for market. But even then, there is no obligation for companies to purchase these carbon credits.

Descendants of Tetepare were intrigued by the prospect and enlisted Bosma and his colleagues to scope the carbon credit project potential of Tetepare. But despite having “potential,” as Bosma put it, the process was upended by infighting among the community members, who couldn’t agree on the best path forward.

Part of the issue, Bosma speculates, is that carbon credit projects don’t offer instantaneous benefits. “If you really start from zero, it takes at least five years,” he says. “Landowners need to stay committed, motivated and patiently waiting.” Such complicated long-term plans test the patience of many Solomon Islanders, who often survive on just the resources in their immediate surroundings.

Bea, who says that convincing her community of the benefits of conservation is the most difficult part of her job, is clearly frustrated by the group of descendants who thwarted the carbon credit program from moving forward. “They want to control the island,” she says. Yet despite this setback, Bea remains confident that her cohort of descendants who believe in the potential of carbon credits will ultimately persuade those opposed to the plan. “Just give them time,” she says, “to realize that they are doing the wrong thing.”