Native forest management in Papua New Guinea: advances in assessment, modelling and decision-making Native forest management in Papua New Guinea: advances in assessment, modelling and decision-making

Forest management worldwide is increasingly focused on values such as biodiversity conservation, carbon, water and recreation as well as timber production. Ownership and governance arrangements are also changing, with an increase in private ownership of forest resources that is focused on timber production and devolution of management and control to the community level. Forest management is particularly challenging for tropical forests due to their diverse composition and structure and a wide range of stakeholder expectations and requirements. New management approaches and policy directions are required to meet these various challenges. Papua New Guinea (PNG) has a significant area of tropical forest composed of a wide range of forest types and environments. Most of the forest is under the customary ownership of indigenous people, with a similarly high ethnic and cultural diversity. Local people have used forest land and resources for thousands of years for subsistence and cultural needs. For the past 20 years, much of the focus of formal forest management and policy in PNG has been on large-scale conventional harvesting to meet national requirements for economic development, with little attention given to community-level forest management. The current management system is considered by many to be unsustainable and, as commercial timber resources from primary forests are exhausted, there have been few examples of future management plans for cutover forests. This has resulted in extensive cutover forest areas being left to degrade over time. This paper presents a review and overview of the stages of development of forest management in PNG and the current state of forest resources. It is argued that a new policy approach is required for forest management that reflects changing local and international expectations, and current and future requirements, for forest management and forest resources. This should include consideration of the future production capacity of cutover and degraded forests as well as development of the capacity of local forest-owner communities to participate in small-scale forest management and utilisation, for example through management systems that are compliant with the requirements of certification bodies.