East Rennell

East Rennell occupies the southern third of the island of Rennell, the southernmost of the Solomon archipelago, in the western Pacific. At 86 kilometres long and fifteen wide, Rennell is the largest raised coral atoll in the world. The property comprises 37,000 hectares of land plus a marine strip of three miles, and UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1998.

After the original atoll was uplifted, its lagoon became Lake Tegano, which at some 15,000 hectares is the largest lake in the Pacific islands. Its brackish waters are dotted with limestone islets and hold species that exist nowhere else, among them the venomous sea snake Laticauda crockeri, found only in this lake. The island has ten endemic plant species, eleven bat species — one of them exclusive — and some forty birds, with four endemic species and nine endemic subspecies. The frequency of cyclones makes the place a natural laboratory for studying ecological resilience.

It was the first natural property in the world inscribed under customary ownership and management: the land belongs to the local clans, not to the state. IUCN has noted that such tenure may favour conservation more than control by a distant administration, but it has also been the argument for its placement on the List of World Heritage in Danger on 18 June 2013, because of commercial logging in the western part of the island, rat invasion and the overexploitation of marine resources.