PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea, June 3, 2008 (ENS) – At the same time that the government of Papua New Guinea is seeking compensation for conserving the carbon-trapping capacity of its the world’s third largest expanse of tropical forests, destruction of these forests is occurring so fast that by 2021 most of the areas accessible to loggers will have been cleared or degraded, a new report based on satellite images reveals.

The images are contained in an extensive report, “The State of the Forests of Papua New Guinea,” produced by scientists at the University of Papua New Guinea Remote Sensing Centre and their colleagues at the Australian National University.

Scientists at the UPNG Remote Sensing Centre discovered that even in so-called conservation “protected areas” forest destruction is occurring at the same pace as in unprotected regions.

Where roads extend through virgin Papua
New Guinea forests, loggers are on
their way. (Photo courtesy UPNG
Remote Sensing Centre)

The researchers spent five years analyzing satellite images that document 30 years of destruction in an area that contains a major portion of the world’s third largest tropical forest. Only the Amazon and Congo forests are bigger.

The scientists estimate that in 2001, Papua New Guinea’s accessible forests were being cleared or degraded at a rate of 362,000 hectares a year – amounting to a combined annual rate of deforestation and degradation of 1.41 percent.

At that pace, by 2021, the authors estimate that 83 percent of the country’s accessible forest – and 53 percent of its total forested area – will be gone or severely damaged.

The forests are under pressure from industrial logging, agricultural expansion and forest fires, the satellite images show.

“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 Phil Shearman, the report’s lead author and Director of the UPNG Remote Sensing Centre.

“It’s fair to wonder why the government should be compensated after encouraging this industry for so long in the past, or why they should get paid in the future to conserve forest that cannot be reached,” Shearman said.

The report concludes that the data on forest destruction justifies curtailing current logging industry activities and scrapping new large-scale projects.

In this 2002 satellite image of Mt.
Giluwe on Papua New Guinea, the
forests are shown in green the
grasslands in pink, and logged
areas in red. (Image courtesy
UPNG Remote Sensing Centre)

It also calls for the government and international development partners to reorient conservation and commercial forestry activities so that they respect the rights of local communities that legally own the forest, and enable members of those communities to better use and conserve the forest for their own development needs.

“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,” Shearman said.

Dr. Julian Ash from the Australian National University said that “by providing an objective, realistic picture of what is actually taking place, the study can offer an opportunity to institute genuine and verifiable programs that will lead to real conservation, sustainable forestry and meaningful participation in carbon trading markets.”

In order to avoid further damage, Shearman and his colleagues say that any new forestry programs should involve small and medium-scale, locally-owned and managed operations where commercial activities are more likely to be environmentally sustainable and the benefits are more likely to flow to forest communities.

The authors believe that it is not too late to act.

“Papua New Guinea is still one of the most heavily forested countries in the world,” Shearman said. “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.”

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It’s easy to think, “Local food is always the best answer,” and leave it at that; most of the time, it might be right, but new information is emerging that disputes local’s lofty position at the throne of TreeHugging food. The notion of “food miles,” the distance your food has traveled to get to your plate, is absolutely an important consideration, but, as it turns out, we might not be able to let the buck stop there.

In a piece for the New York Times [www.nytimes.com], James E. McWilliams, the author of “A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America,” argues that it isn’t as simple as sourcing your food from local farmers, at farmer’s markets and through community-supported agriculture, and calling it a day. While there are undeniable benefits of eating local — unbeatable freshness, which leads to better taste, a more meaningful connection with your food and where it comes from and a more mindful approach to eating, just to name a few — McWilliams believes that, though it’s quite intuitive, fewer food miles (and, you’d think, fewer greenhouse gas emissions) doesn’t necessary mean it’s better for the environment. What?

“It all depends on how you wield the carbon calculator,” says McWilliams. “Instead of measuring a product’s carbon footprint through food miles alone, the Lincoln University scientists expanded their equations to include other energy-consuming aspects of production — what economists call ‘factor inputs and externalities’ — like water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.” Given these ideas — a more life cycle analysis-type approach — the relative carbon footprint of foods, both local and otherwise, can change very quickly. To wit: lamb raised in New Zealand’s lush clover pastures and shipped to Britain “produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.”

Hmm. So what does that mean for the burgeoning “eat local” movement? It sounds bad, but, says McWilliams, it absolutely doesn’t have to be: “‘Eat local’ advocates — a passionate cohort of which I am one — are bound to interpret these findings as a threat. We shouldn’t. Not only do life cycle analyses offer genuine opportunities for environmentally efficient food production, but they also address several problems inherent in the eat-local philosophy.
“Consider the most conspicuous ones: it is impossible for most of the world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet through exclusively local food production — food will always have to travel; asking people to move to more fertile regions is sensible but alienating and unrealistic; consumers living in developed nations will, for better or worse, always demand choices beyond what the season has to offer.”
For the most part, we think McWilliams gets it right; essentially, what he’s saying can be boiled down to a great quote, also from the Times: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” [www.nytimes.com] There is no room for blind consumption in the green world, and, like many other environmental issues, there is no silver bullet for eating green all the time, and no one method — all organic, all local, etc. — will a perfectly green meal make. Get all the details about this new take on local here in the New York Times [www.nytimes.com].