Kiribati celebrates New Year's Eve among the world's first inhabited locations because of its UTC+14 time zone.
Kiribati's Line Islands, including Kiritimati, use UTC+14, the world's furthest-ahead civil time zone. As a result, midnight on January 1 reaches these islands before it reaches most other inhabited places, making them prominent in global “first New Year” reports.
The situation follows Kiribati's 1994 decision to move the International Date Line around its eastern islands. Before the change, the country's island groups could be separated by a calendar day. Aligning the date across the nation simplified administration and allowed the Line Islands to share the same calendar date as the rest of Kiribati.
The distinction concerns inhabited locations and civil time, not the first sunrise in an absolute astronomical sense. Kiribati is a sovereign island country in the central Pacific, and Kiritimati is its best-known island associated with the early New Year.