5 June 2008 | Luca Del Buono

 

A new satellite analysis of logging in Papua New Guinea shows that the country has been losing about 1,400 square miles of rain forest, or about 1.4 percent of its total forest cover, each year.

At that pace, by 2021 more than 80 percent of the country's accessible forest, and more than half of its total forest area, would be badly degraded or cleared, according to the study.

It was conducted by scientists at the University of Papua New Guinea and Australian National University.

Logging and road building are already leading to erosion and fragmentation of ecosystems harboring some of the world's most varied, and least-studied, wildlife, said Phil Shearman, the lead author and director of the Remote Sensing Center of the University of Papua New Guinea.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Shearman said there was still plenty of potential for cut areas to regenerate, but only if policies were changed to end what is essentially uncontrolled "timber mining."

He added that more would also have to be done to help fast-growing communities shift from continually clearing new forest areas for cropland to using less damaging farming methods.

The study was released Monday in Port Moresby at a conference on climate and forests. In international climate talks, New Guinea has been pushing for wealthy countries worried about global warming to pay forested countries to shift from cutting to conservation.

Mr. Shearman said he was worried that all the accessible forests would be gone by the time such initiatives were worked out.

In a written introduction to the report, Belden Namah, New Guinea's minister for forests and an owner of timber holdings, endorsed it as a necessary "bitter pill that we need to swallow to ensure that we maintain our forests into the foreseeable future."

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

Source: New York Times

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