‘Little known about forests’

The National Main Stories

By LULU MARK
FORESTS play an important role in mitigating the effects of climate change but not much is known about the forests of Papua New Guinea, Minister for Forests Walter Schnaubelt says. He said of the total PNG landmass of 46 million ha, 36 million ha (78 per cent) was still covered by forests which were rich in biodiversity and rural communities still shared strong links to forests and depended on them for their livelihoods. “We still do not know enough about what is contained in the forests in terms of timber volume and biodiversity and total carbon stock,” Schnaubelt said. He said the PNG Forest Authority (PNGFA) started collecting data as part of the multipurpose national forest inventory (NFI) with support from the European Union, Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations and the United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (UN-REDD). “PNGFA was only able to cover seven provinces and the rest of the country is yet to be assessed as the funding to conduct such assessments was exhausted,” he said. “We did not fully cover most of the identified areas in those seven provinces as such an activity requires a massive amount of money and time, so provinces like Central, Eastern Highlands, West New Britain, Western Highlands and Northern were not fully covered.” Only Madang and Morobe were adequately covered.  Schnaubelt said the NFI work was important for PNG because:

  • IT is one of the top 10 most vulnerable countries to impacts of climate change;
  • 2.5 MILLION hectares of forest were degraded between 2000 and 2015;
  • LOGGING is responsible for 92 per cent of forest degradation; and,
  • SINCE 2015, PNG has become a net source of carbon emissions from land use and energy sector.

“PNGFA is taking steps to address some of these challenges to align with the Government’s policy directive to ban round log exports, increase downstream processing and expand forest plantations,” he said. Schnaubelt said a key ecosystem service that his department could provide was the creation of forest carbon pilot projects in vulnerable forest ecosystems and forest plantations for carbon trade. “Having targeted forest carbon projects would restore ecosystems and promote revenue generation for rural people,” he said.