Eighty years after intense battles were fought over the remote archipelago that proved a pivotal theatre in the Allied campaign to stop Japan’s advance in the South Pacific, Solomon Islanders are still regularly maimed and killed by ordnance discarded by US and Japanese forces when they died or withdrew.

The deadly remnants of war - unexploded munitions known as UXO, rusting airplanes, tanks, and warships in danger of leaking oil on the seabed – stretch from Guadalcanal westward to the border with Papua New Guinea, blighting the daily lives of the 700,000-strong population.  

Experts believe hundreds of thousands of potentially lethal unexploded items may remain beneath major population areas, including Honiara, where some of the fiercest air, sea and land combat took place between thousands of US and Japanese troops in the Battle of Guadalcanal from 1942 to 1943.

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