According to a new report, Papua New Guinea is at risk of losing more than half of its rainforests by 2021 because of commercial logging, subsistence agriculture and poor conservation efforts. Scientists from the University of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Australian National University spent five years analysing satellite images that showed deforestation and habitat destruction between 1972 and 2002. They estimated that in 2001 the nation’s accessible forests were being cleared or degraded at an annual rate of 362,000 hectares (3,620 sq km). The images also showed that trees in protected areas were being felled at the same rate as unprotected regions, the team added.
Although it only accounts for less than 0.5% of the Earth’s land cover, the heavily forested island nation is home to an estimated 6-7% of the planet’s species. The researchers mapped forest cover and degradation in 2002, using high-resolution images from Landsat ETM+, SPOT4 and SPOT5 satellites. They then compared this with a baseline detailed map from 1972 to show the extent of forest loss over a 30-year period.
The team found that the main drivers were commercial logging, subsistence agriculture and burning. Commercial logging operations are extracting more than 2.6% of the accessible resources yearly and causing the release of about 22 million tonnes of carbon.
Papua New Guinea’s government backs the concept of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD), which was considered at last year’s global climate summit in Bali. Under the scheme, developing nations with large forested areas could be paid by industrialised countries not to cut down trees. The rich nations could then offset some of their own emissions against the carbon dioxide absorbed and stored by the trees that they paid to be protected from being felled. But Mr Shearman said that the current rate of forest loss would make it hard for officials to convince people that they were serious about protecting the forests.
“If they are allowing multinational timber companies to take everything that’s accessible, all that will be left will be the lands that are physically inaccessible to exploitation and would never have been logged anyway.” Mr Shearman said
The researchers warned: “It takes centuries, not decades, for rainforests to recover from such changes.
– from BBC
Carbon trading is fraud. Wealth of some counties is not a license to pollute infinitely by exploiting poverty of other countries. The reson why they are rich contries is that they are looting larger number of countries.