Ralph Regenvanu

Ralph Regenvanu (born 22 May 1970) is a Vanuatu politician, anthropologist, and artist who has served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, International Cooperation and External Trade and as Leader of the Opposition. A founding figure in Vanuatu's climate-justice diplomacy, he has used the country's small voice at the United Nations to push large industrial nations toward stronger emissions accountability.

Born in Suva, Fiji, to a ni-Vanuatu father and an Australian mother, Regenvanu grew up in Port Vila and studied development studies, anthropology, and art history at the Australian National University. He returned home in 1995 to direct the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, where he coordinated fieldworker networks across the archipelago's eighty inhabited islands and helped revive customary knowledge systems threatened by decades of missionary and colonial pressure.

He entered Parliament in 2008 as the head of a new movement focused on land tenure, customary economies, and constitutional reform, later joining and leading the Graon mo Jastis Pati. Appointed Minister of Lands in 2013 and Foreign Minister in 2017, he piloted Vanuatu's 2023 UN General Assembly resolution requesting an International Court of Justice advisory opinion on states' climate obligations, which passed by consensus.

He has also worked as a painter and curator and writes regularly on Pacific cultural policy. In 2022 he was elected Leader of the Opposition, and he has continued to argue that Pacific nations face existential rather than rhetorical climate stakes.

The name Ralph derives from Old Norse Ráðúlfr, joining ráð (counsel) and úlfr (wolf). He has brought both meanings into Pacific service: counsel given on behalf of low-lying nations whose territory is being negotiated away by other people's emissions, and the doggedness of a hunter unwilling to lose the scent.