- In February 2024, Papua New Guinea’s parliament passed the Protected Areas Bill, first introduced two decades ago, into an act, which aims to establish a national system of protected areas to achieve the conservation target of protecting 30% of PNG’s territory by 2030.
- The act lays out a legal framework for working with customary landowners in the country to earmark protected areas, establishes regulations to manage these areas and provides provisions for alternative livelihoods to forest-dependent communities.
- The act also mandates the establishment of a long-term Biodiversity and Climate Task Fund, which communities can access to implement their management plans and conservation objectives.
- While conservationists say the act is a good step toward protecting biodiversity, they raise concerns about its implementation and whether the promised benefits of protected areas will reach landowning communities.
With more than 70% of the country blanketed by tropical rainforests, Papua New Guinea (PNG) is a megadiverse country home to more than 5% of the world’s biodiversity, including charismatic tree kangaroos, egg-laying echidnas and flightless cassowaries. However, since 1972, nearly a third of the country’s rainforest has been lost or degraded due to logging, road construction, agricultural expansion and mining.
In a significant push to conservation, the country’s parliament passed the Protected Areas Act 2023 on Feb. 20. The new legislation aims to establish a national system of protected areas in the country and achieve the “30 by 30” goal of designating 30% of its land and sea as protected areas by 2030. Currently, less than 4% of land and 1% of sea in PNG are designated as protected areas.
The Protected Areas Bill was based on the PNG National Policy on Protected Areas road map to protect the country’s biodiversity and cultural heritage. Now passed into an act, it provides mechanisms for the Conservation and Environment Protection Authority (CEPA), a federal agency responsible for the sustainable management of natural and physical resources, to engage with communities and provincial and local governments to regulate and manage protected areas in the country.
“Previously, there was no guiding legislation to establish protected areas in the country,” says Phelameya Joku Haiveta, CEPA program officer, adding that past legislation aimed at conservation and species protection hasn’t worked. “The communities have not really seen the benefits of conservation at their level.”
The new bill was drafted to help communities lead conservation efforts by providing them with resources and support to pursue alternative livelihoods such as ecotourism and organic farming that do not depend on extracting resources from the forests, easing their access to funds needed for conservation and management of protected areas in the long term and enforcing stricter punishments for those violating the provisions of the act.
“I am happy that this bill has been passed, which we have been working towards to push the government and organize support among communities,” says Kambi Peso, a conservationist at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in PNG, who works with many local communities on conservation. “It is a kind of success for us.” UNDP partners with the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the world’s largest funder of environmental projects, to provide small grants for conservation projects in PNG, and it has played a key role in mobilizing support for the act.
What the act promises
In PNG, more than 90% of land is customary land owned by individuals or groups who depend on the forests for resources and livelihoods. Historically, many landowners, often poor and living in remote areas, have given up land for development, such as logging or palm oil plantations, in return for money. “That’s something that has superseded conservation,” Haiveta says.
As part of the new act, communities can work with CEPA to designate their land as a protected area. “They decide if they want to allocate the areas for conservation, and if they don’t, then we don’t force them,” she says, adding that the process follows free, prior and informed consent, a right guaranteed under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
If landowners choose to allocate their lands for conservation, CEPA promises to support them with the resources and technical support they need to pursue sustainable livelihood projects that could involve ecotourism, sustainable fisheries and organic farming. The participating landowning clans must design a mandatory management plan outlining how the land and its resources will be used to promote conservation.
The act also mandates the establishment of management committees for each protected area, with representation from federal agencies, local wards and provincial governments that can decide on the funding and resources needed to implement management plans and sustainable livelihood projects in the protected areas. Previously, there weren’t enough resources or funding to establish such committees and administer local management plans, Haiveta says.
In addition, the act provides a uniform legal and regulatory mechanism to define a protected area. Previously, many NGOs that established protected areas worked with the communities to design restrictions on using these areas. “We sort of introduced some kind of bylaws, which the communities agreed on and signed the deal,” Peso says, adding that these areas weren’t regularized at the national level.
The restrictions defined in the new act are legally binding, and breaking them will result in fines of up to K200,000 ($52,178) and a prison term of up to five years.
Sustaining funding for community-led conservation efforts has been a challenge in the country. “People were trying to do their best with conservation, but there was a big gap in terms of sustainability and management of these projects,” Peso says. “People get excited [initially], but after 2-3 years, they lose interest in the conservation projects because these landowners need to find some kind of alternatives to boost their incomes.”
The new act proposes three funding mechanisms for conservation. It sets out biodiversity offsets, a mechanism in which entities involved in development and investment in the country will compensate for damages to the environment and loss of biodiversity. It also establishes a Biodiversity and Climate Fund to finance the management of protected areas, which will be funded through biodiversity offsets, green taxes and other governmental and nongovernmental mechanisms. The act also establishes a first-of-its-kind small grants program, which communities can directly access to fund their conservation efforts. Peso says this fund already has $60 million, provided by GEF, which was waiting to be spent after the bill passed.
Can the act deliver?
The complete details of the Protected Areas Act have yet to be made public, with certification and publication of the full act expected to come in April. However, it has already drawn some criticism and skepticism. The biggest concern, Haiveta says, is whether CEPA can effectively administer the process outlined in the act and whether communities get the promised conservation benefits. To alleviate these fears, she says CEPA must proactively reach out to communities and spread awareness about the act and its benefits.
Judging by what he has seen so far, Adelbert Gangai, a conservationist and a customary landowner from Collingwood Bay in Oro province, says landowners might not be too happy with the act in its current form, especially regarding contracting their land to CEPA. “I, for one, would not in any circumstance be willing to contract the custody of my customary land … to be placed in the hands of third parties,” he tells Mongabay by text message. He alleges that CEPA’s track record as a conservation agency isn’t strong, as it has let companies encroach on protected areas in Collingwood Bay, despite court judgements in favor of landowners. “Should I [contract] custody of my property to CEPA? In my view, this is simply trusting the devil to do the right,” Gangai says.
One of the ways that CEPA can work with landowners is through incorporated land groups (ILGs), a legal recognition given to customary groups, who can then do business, hold, dispose, manage and deal with land in their customary name. One needs a national ID to be a part of ILG. However, obtaining such an ID for remote communities is a challenge.
“ILGs [are] currently becoming quite difficult to obtain by landowning clans … as the national ID issue offices are quite expensive to reach, as they are located in major centers,” says Gangai, adding that remote PNG communities, which make up about 80% of the population, are cut off from roads and highways.
Acknowledging these challenges, Haiveta says CEPA must provide the communities, whose literacy levels are low and who are cut off from telecommunication networks, with all the necessary resources. “That’s basically our job,” she says. “It needs to be done.”
Peso is concerned whether the government can deliver the financial promises outlined in the act. “The government has been passing bill after bill, but in actual monetary support and stuff like that, it doesn’t really know the place,” he says, “My question is, will the government actually fulfill what is introduced?” He cites the highly politicized working of CEPA and corruption as possible roadblocks. “I’m hoping for the best for the conservation communities.”
But for PNG, the stakes are high.
“If we don’t fully get the act to do what it’s supposed to do, we will not be able to reach that 30% goal, and then if that happens, that’s just the honest reflection of the state of our country, and we have to improve and do better,” Haiveta says.
Banner image: A flame bowerbird (Sericulus ardens) in PNG. Image by Nik Borrow via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
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