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. A tree Kangaroo, one of the many rare species living in PNG’s lowland forests. Pictured here at the Melbourne zoo. Image by Tom Jefferson/Greenpeace. “Previously, there was no guiding legislation to establish protected areas in the country,” says Phelameya Joku Haiveta, CEPA program officer, adding that past legislation…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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