Melanesia is a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, extending from New Guinea in the west to the Fiji Islands in the east, and includes the Arafura Sea. The region includes the four independent countries of Fiji, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea. The name Melanesia was first used in 1832 by French navigator Jules Dumont dUrville to designate what he viewed as the three main ethnic and geographical regions forming the Pacific, along with Micronesia and Polynesia. The name Melanesia, from Greek μέλας, black, and νῆσος, island, etymologically means "islands of black .
Melanesia is one of the most culturally complex regions of the world, with 1,293 languages spoken across the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and the island of New Guinea (politically divided into Indonesia’s West Papua Province and the nation of Papua New Guinea) . The region has been settled for around 45,000 years, and people lived in small-scale societies often without strong leadership systems. Instead, communities were bound by ties of family and by complex networks of trade and exchange.
Melanesia is also one of the worlds biodiversity hotspots, with unique species found from the worlds largest and highest tropical island, through one of the most biologically rich oceanic archipelagos on Earth, to isolated oceanic islands with outstanding proportions of unique species. Among its many biological assets, Melanesia hosts one of the largest remaining rainforest areas in the world in Papua New Guinea, where an estimated 7% of global terrestrial biodiversity occurs in less than 1% of global land area.
European countries such as Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, Germany, and Japan established colonial claims to various parts of Melanesia in the past, and colonial disruptions continued throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. Since the 1970s, multinational and transnational corporations have moved into Melanesia and have brought additional changes, especially in Papua New Guinea. Most of the international logging investment in Melanesia has centered on that country, which has more than 175,000 square miles of forested land.
