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Tarawa atoll Kiribati, Kiribati
Kiribati KIR
Tarawa atoll Kiribati — Photo: Photo taken by Government of Kiribati employee in the course of their work / CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Did You Know Weightlifter David Katoatau won Kiribati's first Commonwealth gold in 2014 and danced off the platform after his lifts at the Rio Olympics to draw attention to sea-level rise at home. — Commonwealth Games Federation

Kiribati is a Pacific republic of about 117,000 people living on 33 coral atolls and reef islands scattered across roughly 3.5 million square kilometres of ocean — a land area of a few hundred square kilometres inside one of the largest exclusive economic zones on earth. The islands fall into three widely separated groups: the Gilberts, where almost all the population lives; the Phoenix Islands, largely uninhabited; and the Line Islands, more than 3,000 kilometres to the east. Because the country straddles both the equator and the 180th meridian, it is the only state with territory in all four hemispheres. The capital is South Tarawa, a densely settled ribbon of islets in Tarawa atoll linked by causeways, where roughly half the national population lives. Independence from the United Kingdom came on 12 July 1979. The people are overwhelmingly I-Kiribati, a Micronesian population speaking Gilbertese alongside official English, and predominantly Christian, with Roman Catholics forming the largest group and the Kiribati Uniting and Protestant churches next. The economy rests on licence fees paid by foreign tuna fleets, remittances from seafarers, copra and a sovereign fund built from long-exhausted phosphate royalties. Average elevation is only a couple of metres, which places the country at the front of the global argument about sea-level rise.

CIA World FactbookEncyclopaedia BritannicaWorld BankIPCC
Population
116,545
Capital
Tarawa
Currency
$ AUD
Time zones
—
Largest city
—
Human Geography Themes
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The Country & Its People

History

Austronesian voyagers settled the Gilbert Islands some three thousand years ago, and later contact and migration from Samoa, Tonga and Fiji added lineages and a body of oral tradition centred on the ancestral homeland of Matang and on the ancestor-hero Nareau. Society was organised by island and by kainga, or extended kin group, with authority exercised through the maneaba, the great community meeting house. European whalers and traders arrived in the nineteenth century, followed by missionaries — Protestants from the north and Catholics from the south, a division still visible in island religious geography — and by blackbirding vessels that carried islanders to plantations abroad. Britain declared a protectorate over the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in 1892 and annexed Banaba, or Ocean Island, in 1900 after the discovery of rock phosphate, which was mined for seven decades until the island was largely stripped and its people resettled to Rabi in Fiji in 1945. Japanese forces occupied the Gilberts in 1941; the American assault on Betio in Tarawa atoll in November 1943 was among the bloodiest actions of the Pacific war. The Ellice Islands separated in 1975 to become Tuvalu, and the Gilberts became independent Kiribati on 12 July 1979 under Ieremia Tabai.
Encyclopaedia BritannicaCIA World FactbookUN

Culture

The organising institution of I-Kiribati life is the maneaba, a large open-sided meeting house with a massive thatched roof carried on coral-stone pillars, which serves as parliament, court, feast hall and dance floor for the community that owns it. Seating within it is not casual: each kin group has an inherited sitting place, or boti, along the perimeter, and decisions are reached by discussion under the guidance of the unimwane, the assembly of older men. That structure gives village governance a formality and a slowness that outsiders often underestimate. Land is held by family rather than sold, and inheritance of narrow strips across an atoll ties people to particular places even when they live in South Tarawa or abroad. Reciprocity in food, labour and ceremony — bubuti, the customary request that is difficult to refuse — is a strong social obligation and a levelling mechanism. Christianity is thoroughly integrated into this framework, and church denomination often follows island and family lines. Life is oriented to the reef and the lagoon, and knowledge of tides, currents, seasons and fish behaviour remains practical rather than antiquarian.
Encyclopaedia BritannicaUNESCOCIA World Factbook

Points Of Pride

The Phoenix Islands Protected Area, declared in 2006 and expanded in 2008, was at its creation the largest marine protected area in the world and was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 2010 — the first such listing for Kiribati and one of the few World Heritage sites that is almost entirely ocean, protecting an intact deep-sea and coral archipelago ecosystem with very little human presence. It is a remarkable commitment for a country with among the smallest economies on earth. Kiribati also holds a peculiar distinction in timekeeping: when the government shifted the international date line eastward around its territory at the start of 1995 so that the whole country would share a single calendar day, it made the Line Islands the earliest time zone in the world, and Caroline Island — renamed Millennium Island — was the first inhabited land to see the sunrise of the year 2000. The nation is proud of its long-distance canoe and navigation heritage, of the maneaba tradition, and of the Marine Training Centre in Tarawa, which has supplied merchant seafarers to the world's shipping fleets since the 1960s.
UNESCO World Heritage CentreUNESCOEncyclopaedia BritannicaCIA World Factbook

Cultural Fusion

Kiribati is ethnically among the most homogeneous countries in the world, but its culture carries clear layers of contact. Oral tradition records Samoan and Tongan incursions and settlement in the southern Gilberts, and the resulting mixture is visible in chiefly systems that are more hierarchical in the north and more egalitarian in the south, and in a body of shared Polynesian narrative grafted onto Micronesian foundations. Missionary Christianity from the 1850s reshaped dress, music and the weekly calendar without displacing the maneaba: hymn singing in dense harmony is now as characteristic of Kiribati as traditional chant, and the tibuta blouse worn by women is a Victorian introduction that has become traditional dress. The colonial link with the Ellice Islands, now Tuvalu, left a Tuvaluan community in Kiribati and close family ties across the two countries, and the Banaban displacement created a permanent I-Kiribati-descended community on Rabi Island in Fiji that retains Kiribati language and dance. Decades of seafaring employment on German and other foreign merchant vessels have carried I-Kiribati men around the world and brought money, goods and outside habits back to the atolls.
Encyclopaedia BritannicaCIA World FactbookUNESCOGlottolog

Music & Dance

Kiribati dance is one of the most distinctive in the Pacific and is instantly recognisable for its stillness and sudden movement: dancers hold the torso rigid, extend the arms and snap the head sideways in gestures explicitly modelled on the frigatebird, the seabird that appears on the national flag. The repertoire includes the seated te bino, performed in rows with intricate arm and hand work, the standing te kaimatoa and the hip dance te buki, and performances are accompanied not by melodic instruments but by massed voice, hand clapping and the percussive beating of a wooden box. Chant texts are composed for occasions and can carry genealogy, praise, satire or grievance, and composers of song hold high standing. Kiribati vocal music is polyphonic and rhythmically dense, and singing at maneaba gatherings can continue for hours. Christian missions added four-part hymnody, which I-Kiribati choirs have made their own and which now blends with indigenous harmonic practice. Dance competition between villages and islands, staged in the maneaba with a panel of judges, remains one of the most important social events in the calendar and a serious matter of local honour.
Encyclopaedia BritannicaUNESCO

Cuisine & Misattributed Foods

Atoll cooking is defined by what will grow on coral sand and what the reef will give. The staples are fish — reef fish, tuna, flying fish, octopus and shellfish, eaten grilled, boiled in coconut cream or raw with lime — together with coconut in every form, breadfruit, pandanus and babai, the giant swamp taro. Babai deserves particular note: it is cultivated in pits dug down to the freshwater lens beneath the atoll, each plant tended for years with mulched leaves and composted material, and a large corm is a prestige food produced for feasts rather than daily eating. Coconut toddy, karewe, is cut from the flowering spathe of the palm each morning and drunk fresh or sweet; boiled down it becomes kamaimai, a dark syrup used as the islands' sugar, and left to ferment it becomes an alcoholic drink. Pandanus fruit is chewed or processed into a preserved paste, te kabubu, that keeps for long periods and was historically voyaging food. Imported rice, flour, sugar and tinned meat and fish now make up a large share of the diet, a shift that has brought serious rates of diabetes and hypertension.
Encyclopaedia BritannicaFAOWHO

National Dress

Traditional I-Kiribati clothing was made from what the atoll produced: the te riri, a skirt of dried and shredded pandanus leaf or coconut fibre, worn by both women and men, together with plaited mats and belts, and ornament of shell, sharks' teeth, hibiscus fibre and human hair. Armour woven from tightly plaited coconut fibre, complete with a high back-plate and a helmet made from a dried porcupine fish, was worn in inter-island fighting and is one of the more remarkable material traditions of the Pacific; examples are held in museum collections abroad. Missionary influence in the nineteenth century introduced the tibuta, a loose short-sleeved cotton blouse trimmed with lace or crochet, which was adopted so completely that it is now regarded as national dress for women and is worn with a wrapped cotton or pandanus skirt for church and ceremony. Dance costume is the most elaborate form: fibre skirts, plaited belts, shell and flower necklaces, and headdresses of pandanus and frangipani, with coconut oil rubbed on the skin. Men wear a lavalava wrap or shorts and shirt for everyday and formal use alike.
Encyclopaedia BritannicaBritish MuseumUNESCO

Sports & Inspiring Athletes

Football is the most widely played sport in Kiribati, organised by the Kiribati Islands Football Association with a domestic competition centred on Tarawa; the association is a member of the Oceania confederation but not of FIFA, which limits the national team to regional tournaments such as the Pacific Games. Volleyball and basketball are played on any available hard ground, and athletics and weightlifting have produced the country's few internationally competitive athletes, with weightlifting supported by a national programme that has punched well above the country's size. Traditional sport centres on the sea and on the maneaba: outrigger canoe racing between villages and islands is the oldest competitive activity, and te ano, a ball game played with a plaited pandanus ball in which players use hands and body to keep it in play, survives as a customary game. Wrestling and traditional forms of fighting recorded in the nineteenth century have largely lapsed. The Betio Sports Complex and the national stadium in South Tarawa are the country's principal venues, and school and church competitions provide most organised sport for young people.
Encyclopaedia BritannicaFIFAIOCCommonwealth Games Federation

Notable Educational Programs

Education in Kiribati is free and compulsory at primary level, and enrolment is high, but the geography of the country — a school population dispersed across islands separated by hundreds or thousands of kilometres of ocean — makes staffing, supply and supervision unusually difficult, and outer-island schools face persistent shortages of trained teachers and materials. Instruction begins in Gilbertese and shifts toward English in later years. Secondary schooling is concentrated on Tarawa and at a small number of church-run boarding schools, several of them long-established mission foundations, which draw students from across the archipelago. The Kiribati Teachers College trains the primary workforce, and the Kiribati Institute of Technology provides vocational and trade qualifications. Tertiary study is largely undertaken through the University of the South Pacific, which operates a Kiribati campus in Tarawa and offers distance and flexible learning across the region, and through scholarships to Fiji, Australia and New Zealand. The most distinctive institution is the Marine Training Centre in Tarawa, established in the 1960s, which trains I-Kiribati men to internationally recognised standards for work on foreign merchant ships; their remittances are a significant source of household income.
UNESCOWorld BankUNICEFCIA World FactbookILO

Wars & Conflicts

Kiribati has no armed forces and has been involved in no war since independence, and its security concerns are environmental and economic rather than military. Its territory did, however, see one of the fiercest battles of the Second World War: the American assault on the Japanese garrison at Betio in Tarawa atoll in November 1943 killed thousands of Japanese, Korean labourers and American Marines in three days of fighting over a strip of coral barely three kilometres long, and the wrecks, bunkers and guns remain on the islet. The unresolved grievance of the independence era concerns Banaba, whose phosphate was mined out under British administration and whose population was moved to Rabi Island in Fiji in 1945; Banaban claims for compensation and for recognition of their status have run for decades and remain a live issue in Kiribati politics, with seats in parliament reserved for Banaban representation. Domestic political disputes have occasionally been sharp, including a 2022 constitutional crisis over the suspension of senior judges, but they have been contested through institutions rather than violence.
Encyclopaedia BritannicaUNReutersCIA World FactbookHuman Rights Watch
Current as of 2026-08-07

Land & Border Disputes

Kiribati has no land boundary with any other state and no territorial dispute over its islands, a consequence of its isolation; the United States relinquished the claims it had maintained over several of the Line and Phoenix Islands in the Treaty of Tarawa concluded at independence. Its external questions are therefore maritime and diplomatic. With one of the world's largest exclusive economic zones and a land area of only a few hundred square kilometres, Kiribati's principal international interest is the management of the tuna stocks within it: the country is a party to the Nauru Agreement and its vessel day scheme, under which Pacific island states jointly set and sell fishing days to distant-water fleets, and licence revenue is the largest single source of government income. That interest sits in tension with conservation, and the government's decision to reopen the Phoenix Islands Protected Area to commercial fishing drew international criticism from scientists and conservation bodies. Kiribati switched its diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the People's Republic of China in September 2019, and it briefly left and then rejoined the Pacific Islands Forum in the early 2020s. Sea-level rise raises unsettled legal questions about whether maritime zones survive the loss of the land that generates them.
UNCIA World FactbookReutersFAO
Land, Life & Legacy

Land & Climate

Kiribati's land is coral: 32 low atolls and one raised limestone island, Banaba, with almost no point rising more than three or four metres above the sea and typical elevations of about two. The three island groups are separated by enormous distances — from Tarawa in the Gilberts to Kiritimati in the Line Islands is farther than London to Cairo — which makes internal transport and administration the country's most persistent practical problem. Kiritimati, or Christmas Island, is the largest coral atoll in the world by land area. Fresh water exists only as a thin lens floating on seawater beneath each islet, recharged by rain and easily contaminated by drought, over-extraction or storm overwash. The climate is tropical maritime, hot and humid year-round with an equatorial rainfall pattern that varies sharply between the wetter northern and drier central islands, and it is strongly modulated by El Niño, which brings heavy rain to the Line Islands and drought to the Gilberts. Kiribati sits outside the main cyclone belt but is acutely exposed to sea-level rise, king tides, storm surge, coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion, hazards that the IPCC identifies as existential for low-lying atoll states.
CIA World FactbookEncyclopaedia BritannicaIPCCUN

Entertainment

Life on an atoll puts recreation on the reef and in the maneaba. Fishing is both livelihood and pastime, from hand-lining in the lagoon to sailing the outrigger canoe, and canoe racing between villages is a keenly followed contest. Swimming, spearfishing and gathering shellfish on the reef flat at low tide occupy children and adults alike. The great communal entertainment is the botaki, a feast and dance gathering held in the maneaba for weddings, birthdays, church anniversaries and visitors, at which villages compete in dance and song and food is distributed by strict custom. Church activity — choir practice, youth groups, Sunday services that run long — structures much of the week. Football and volleyball are played on any flat ground, and te ano, a traditional ball game played with a woven pandanus ball, survives in some islands. Board games, cards and bingo are common in South Tarawa, and mobile phones and satellite television have arrived unevenly across the outer islands. Visitors are few: tourism is limited by distance and by air links, and centres on Kiritimati's world-renowned bonefishing flats and on wartime relics at Betio.
Encyclopaedia BritannicaUNWTOCIA World Factbook

Art & Museums

I-Kiribati art is almost entirely made to be used. Plaiting is the dominant medium: pandanus leaf worked into sleeping mats, sails, baskets, fans, hats and the fine mats given at ceremonies, with pattern created through dyeing and the direction of the weave rather than applied decoration. Coconut fibre is twisted into sennit cordage of great strength, used to lash canoe hulls and house frames without nails and worked into the celebrated coconut-fibre body armour. Shell, sharks' teeth and wood are combined into ornament and into the toothed weapons that European collectors carried away in the nineteenth century, so that some of the finest surviving Kiribati material sits in the British Museum and other overseas collections. Canoe building is the highest craft: the te wa outrigger, with its asymmetric hull and lateen sail, is shaped by eye and by inherited proportion and is the object on which a builder's reputation rests. Architecture, in the maneaba, is the most imposing form — a roof of pandanus thatch on coral pillars, proportioned by tradition and built by community labour. Song composition and dance choreography are regarded as art forms of comparable seriousness.
British MuseumEncyclopaedia BritannicaUNESCO

Notable People

Ieremia Tabai led Kiribati to independence in 1979 and became its first president at the age of twenty-nine, one of the youngest heads of state anywhere at the time, serving until 1991. Teburoro Tito followed as president through the 1990s. Anote Tong, president from 2003 to 2016, became the most internationally recognised I-Kiribati figure of the modern era through his campaign on climate change and sea-level rise, addressing the United Nations repeatedly, arguing the case for atoll nations at successive climate conferences and advancing the policy he called migration with dignity, under which Kiribati purchased land on Vanua Levu in Fiji in 2014 as a contingency and pressed for skilled migration pathways for its citizens. His government also created the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. Taneti Maamau succeeded him in 2016. In sport, the weightlifter David Katoatau won Kiribati's first Commonwealth Games gold medal at Glasgow in 2014 and became widely known at the 2016 Rio Olympics for dancing after his lifts, a gesture he explained as an attempt to draw the world's attention to the threat facing his country.
UNEncyclopaedia BritannicaCommonwealth Games FederationIOC

Inventions & Breakthroughs

Kiribati's inventions are the technologies that make permanent life possible on coral sand with no rivers, no soil and no metal. The first is agricultural: the babai pit, in which cultivators dig through the coral down to the freshwater lens and build up planting beds of composted leaf litter, allowing giant swamp taro to be grown on ground that supports almost nothing else — a system of soil creation maintained across generations. The second is nautical: the te wa outrigger canoe, with an asymmetric hull, a single outrigger to windward and a lateen sail, capable of speeds and windward performance that astonished European observers, together with a body of navigational knowledge based on star paths, swell patterns, cloud formation and bird flight that allowed voyaging across open ocean without instruments. The third is architectural: the maneaba, whose vast thatched roof is engineered to shed tropical rain and to survive wind while framed and lashed entirely with timber, pandanus and coconut sennit. Coconut-fibre armour and porcupine-fish helmets solved the problem of body protection without metal. Karewe toddy cutting and kabubu pandanus preservation are the corresponding food technologies.
Encyclopaedia BritannicaBritish MuseumFAO

Science & Technology

Kiribati matters to science mainly as a place that is studied, and as a country whose circumstances have forced it into unusually forward-looking policy. Its atolls are among the most closely monitored sites in the world for sea-level rise, shoreline change and freshwater-lens salinity, and the IPCC treats low-lying atoll states as a category of acute risk, with saltwater intrusion, coral bleaching and king-tide inundation already affecting settlement and agriculture. The Phoenix Islands Protected Area functions as a large-scale natural laboratory for coral reef recovery in the near-absence of local human pressure, and research expeditions there have documented both severe bleaching events and subsequent regeneration. Practical technology is directed at survival: rainwater harvesting and storage, solar photovoltaic systems that have displaced diesel generation on many outer islands, desalination on Tarawa, and coastal protection using seawalls and mangrove planting, much of it delivered with support from the World Bank, the United Nations and regional agencies. The country established a Revenue Equalisation Reserve Fund in 1956 from Banaban phosphate royalties, one of the oldest sovereign wealth funds in the world, to convert an exhaustible resource into a permanent endowment.
IPCCWorld BankUNNatureIEA
On The World Stage

Champions & Defining Moments

Kiribati made its Olympic debut at Athens in 2004, three years after the formation of its national Olympic committee, and has sent small teams to every Summer Games since, competing in athletics, weightlifting, judo and taekwondo, generally under universality places. It has not yet won an Olympic medal. Its outstanding international result came at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014, when the weightlifter David Katoatau won the men's 105 kilogram category — the first Commonwealth gold medal in the country's history and, for a nation of barely a hundred thousand people, a national event. Katoatau went on to compete at the Rio Olympics in 2016, where his habit of dancing off the platform after each lift drew worldwide attention that he used deliberately to talk about sea-level rise and the future of his islands. Kiribati competes regularly at the Pacific Games and the Micronesian Games, where it has won medals in athletics, weightlifting and canoeing, and takes part in Oceania regional football competitions. Distance, cost and the absence of full-size training facilities remain the principal constraints on international participation.

IOCOlympediaCommonwealth Games Federation
Economy, Trade & Government

Currency & GDP

Australian Dollar — AUD ($)

GDP (PPP): $438.143 million (2024 est.)

Per capita: $3,300 (2024 est.)

Exports

$17.099 million (2023 est.)

fish, coconut oil (2023)

Partners: Thailand 85%, Japan 6%, Philippines 3%, UAE 2%, Fiji 1% (2023)

Imports

$293.624 million (2023 est.)

ships, centrifuges, refined petroleum, rice, raw sugar (2023)

Partners: China 24%, Australia 20%, Fiji 15%, Japan 7%, NZ 6% (2023)

Government

Type: presidential republic

Independence: 12 July 1979 (from the UK)

Terrain → Where People Live

How mountains, coasts, and rivers shape settlement (LandScan).

Coming — data

Migration & Ethnic Settlement

Where groups settled and how people move (GeoEPR + UNHCR).

Coming — data

Universities

Notable institutions, mappable as points.

Coming — data
Economy & government facts: CIA World Factbook (public domain), via OpenFactBook / factbook.json.
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