Deforestation and degradation in Papua New Guinea: a response to Filer and colleagues, 2009
Date
2010
Authors
Shearman, Philip L.
Bryan, Jane
Ash, Julian
Mackey, Brendan
Lokes, Barbara
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Publisher
EDP Sciences
Abstract
Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) forests are a vital natural resource
for the human population that they sustain, the wide
biological diversity they contain, the ecological services they
provide and their global role in maintaining climatic processes
(Hunt, 2006; Bryan et al., in press). The population of PNG is
expanding by approximately 2–3% annually, requiring forest
clearance for subsistence cultivation, and over recent decades
the log export industry has expanded greatly. Though these and
other drivers of forest change are well known, there has been
considerable debate regarding the extent and rate at which
forests are being degraded or converted to other forms of land
use. This debate has been fuelled by an absence of recent accurate
data, and coloured by the politics associated with industrial
rainforest exploitation and more recently, carbon-related
REDD projects1. To address this deficiency we undertook a
6-year research project that involved mapping the entire PNG
forest estate at high resolution, and compared this with maps
from the early 1970s. Our results provide detailed, accurate
measurement of the area and condition of forest in PNG, how
much forest has been cleared or degraded over the past three
decades, and what caused these changes. Our research was initially
published as a detailed report (Shearman et al., 2008)
that has also been published, in abbreviated form, in the peerreviewed
journal Biotropica (Shearman et al., 2009). Our most
controversial finding was that overall rates of forest clearance
and degradation were much higher than those estimated in the
early 1990s (Hammermaster and Saunders, 1995; McAlpine
and Quigley, 1998; McAlpine and Freyne, 2001). This is partly
because the rates are accelerating but it is mostly due to technical
differences in measuring forest cover and forest cover
change.
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Source
Annals of Forest Science
Type
Journal article
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Restricted until
2060-01-31
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