Satellite images reveal Papua forest destruction

Michael Perry, Reuters 2 Jun 08;

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Thirty years of satellite imagery of Papua New Guinea's rainforests has revealed destruction on such a rapid scale that by 2021 most accessible forest will be destroyed or degraded, a study released on Monday said.

Papua New Guinea has the world's third largest tropical rainforest, after the Amazon and the Congo, and its government is seeking compensation for conserving its forests as carbon-traps to help reduce global greenhouse gases.

Papua New Guinea has allowed widespread logging of its forests and the new report, by the University of Papua New Guinea and the Australian National University, questions its commitment to saving rainforests in the mountainous South Pacific nation.

"Forests in Papua New Guinea are being logged repeatedly and wastefully with little regard for the environmental consequences and with at least the passive complicity of government authorities," said Phil Shearman, director of the University of Papua New Guinea's Remote Sensing Centre.

"Government officials may claim that they wish rich countries to pay them for conserving their forests, but if they are allowing multinational timber companies to take everything that's accessible, all that will be left will be lands that are physically inaccessible to exploitation and would never have been logged anyway," said Shearman.

Destruction of forests produces about 20 percent of man-made carbon dioxide emissions, so their conservation is vital to limiting rises in global temperatures.

The report, which measured PNG's forests from 1972 to 2002, found that accessible forests were being cleared at a rate of 362,000 hectares (895,000 acres) a year in 2001, or about 1.41 percent of the country's forests annually.

In 1972, PNG had 38 million hectares (94 million acres), of rainforest covering 82 percent of the country. Between 1972 and 2002, around 15 percent of its rainforests had been cleared.

In 2002, PNG's forests covered 33 million hectares (81.5 million acres), or 71 percent of the country's land mass, and supported 6 to 7 percent of the world's animal and plant species.

By 2021 an estimated 83 percent of accessible forest and 53 percent of PNG's total forests would be destroyed or severely damaged, said the report.

FORESTS NOT LIMITLESS

"Papua New Guinea is still one of the most heavily forested countries in the world," Shearman said in a statement.

"For the first time, we have evidence of what's happening in the PNG forests. The government could make a significant contribution to global efforts to combat climate change. It is in its own interest to do so, as this nation is particularly susceptible to negative effects due to loss of the forest cover."

The report said deforestation was occurring at the same rate in protected and unprotected areas and justified a significant reduction in logging in PNG.

Any new forestry programmes should involve small and medium-scale, locally-owned and managed operations where commercial activities are more likely to be environmentally sustainable, it said.

Minister for Forests Belden Namah said economic development had taken precedence over conservation in PNG, a developing nation that has struggled to prosper from its vast mineral wealth. Most of its 6 million population live subsistence lives in villages.

"Over the past decades we have imagined that our forests are limitless. If this report is the bitter pill that we need to swallow to ensure that we maintain our forests into the foreseeable future, so be it," Namah said in the report.

"If in 50 years, PNG is left only with scraps of forest inside national parks then we have all failed."

(Editing by Alex Richardson)

Half of Papua New Guinea's forests gone by 2021: study
Yahoo News 2 Jun 08;

Half of Papua New Guinea's forests will be lost or damaged in just over a decade, speeding up local climate change, unless logging is dramatically reduced, a study released Monday found.

The University of Papua New Guinea report, which used satellite images to show the loss in forest cover between 1972 and 2002, found that at current rates, 53 percent of forest was at risk of being destroyed by 2021.

The study, conducted in conjunction with the Australian National University, found that even in so-called conservation areas, trees were being logged or cut down by local subsistence farmers unabated.

"The unfortunate reality is that forests in Papua New Guinea are being logged repeatedly and wastefully with little regard for the environmental consequences and with at least the passive complicity of government authorities," the report's lead author Phil Shearman said in a statement.

Papua New Guinea has the world's third largest tropical forest but it was being cleared or degraded at a rate of 362,000 hectares (895,000 acres) a year in 2001, the report said.

Shearman said it was internationally recognised that tropical forests were "sink holes of jaw-droppingly large amounts of carbon".

"So the destruction of forest... releases that carbon into the atmosphere," he told AFP, adding raising carbon levels in the atmosphere had an impact on global warming.

"Papua New Guinea's forests are... of national and regional significance because of their carbon storage factors, they are critically important for the regional stability of our climate," he said.

"And they also hold probably somewhere between six and 10 percent of the world's biodiversity."

The report calls for a dramatic drop in logging -- or the consequences could be significant, Shearman said.

"If these trends are allowed to continue for the next 10 or 15 years it will result in significant major proportions of Papua New Guinea's forest being cleared or logged," he said.

Forests Minister Belden Namah said the government was already taking steps to review its policies towards the country's greatest natural resource.

"There's a need for rapid action to replace trees that have been cut," he said.

"And I believe for every tree that has been cut, we should plant three more new trees. That is one major policy I am looking at."

Namah acknowledged that commercial logging contributed 176 million US dollars to the national purse each year.

"But at the same time we understand that there needs to be control as to the logging activities in the country, there's a call for sustainable forest management," he told reporters via a telephone link.

The report said Papua New Guinea was still one of the most heavily forested countries in the world and it was not too late to act.

"For the first time, we have evidence of what's happening in the PNG forests," Shearman said.

"The government could make a significant contribution to global efforts to combat climate change. It is in its own interest to do so, as this nation is particularly susceptible to negative effects due to loss of the forest cover."

Papua New Guinea rainforest destruction
Nick Squires, The Telegraph 2 Jun 08;

The chopping down of Papua New Guinea's rainforests is happening much more quickly than previously thought, driven by Asia's insatiable demand for timber and one of the world's fastest growing populations.

Satellite imagery has revealed destruction on such a large scale that within 12 years most of the accessible forest in the south-east Asian nation will be destroyed or degraded, a study said.

Logging companies have been operating in the country for years but the exact extent of their encroachment on virgin forests was unknown.

Satellite monitoring now shows that the rate of deforestation is comparable to that in the Amazon and in the Congo Basin, said scientists from the University of Papua New Guinea and the Australian National University.

"The bad news is that it was previously thought that PNG had a very low or non-existent rate of deforestation and degradation," said Phil Shearman, director of the University of Papua New Guinea's Remote Sensing Centre.

"Our study is making it reasonably clear that's not the case - indeed PNG is losing its rainforest at rates comparable to that of the Congo and to that of the Amazon.

"Government officials may claim that they wish rich countries to pay them for conserving their forests, but if they are allowing multinational timber companies to take everything that's accessible, all that will be left will be lands that are physically inaccessible to exploitation and would never have been logged anyway."

Papua New Guinea's tropical rainforest - the world's third largest - is not only being logged by timber firms but also cleared for subsistence farming, in a country of 6m people with one of the highest population growth rates in the world.

In 1972, the former British colony's rainforests covered 94m acres, or 82 per cent of the country, satellite monitoring showed.

By 2002, that had fallen to 81m acres, or 71 per cent of the country's land mass.

At the current rate of deforestation, 83 per cent of accessible forest and 53 per cent of the country's total forests will be destroyed or severely damaged by 2021.

"So there's a much shorter time frame than anyone has previously realised," said Julian Ash, from the Australian National University, a co-author of the report.

The country's minister for forests, Belden Namah, said economic development had taken precedence over conservation and the report was a wake-up call.

"Over the past decades we have imagined that our forests are limitless.

"If this report is the bitter pill that we need to swallow to ensure that we maintain our forests into the forseeable future, so be it.

"If in 50 years, PNG is left only with scraps of forest inside national parks, then we have all failed."