Half of Papua New Guinea Forests Could Vanish

June 2, 2008 -- Half of Papua New Guinea's forests will be lost or damaged in just over a decade, speeding up local climate change, unless logging is dramatically reduced, a study released Monday found.

The University of Papua New Guinea report, which used satellite images to show the loss in forest cover between 1972 and 2002, found that at current rates, 53 percent of forest was at risk of being destroyed by 2021.

The study, conducted in conjunction with the Australian National University, found that even in so-called conservation areas, trees were being logged or cut down by local subsistence farmers unabated.

"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," the report's lead author Phil Shearman said in a statement.

Papua New Guinea has the world's third largest tropical forest but it was being cleared or degraded at a rate of 362,000 hectares (895,000 acres) a year in 2001, the report said.

Shearman said it was internationally recognized that tropical forests were "sink holes of jaw-droppingly large amounts of carbon".

"So the destruction of forest... releases that carbon into the atmosphere," he told AFP, adding raising carbon levels in the atmosphere had an impact on global warming.

"Papua New Guinea's forests are... of national and regional significance because of their carbon storage factors, they are critically important for the regional stability of our climate," he said.

"And they also hold probably somewhere between six and 10 percent of the world's biodiversity."

The report calls for a dramatic drop in logging -- or the consequences could be significant, Shearman said.

"If these trends are allowed to continue for the next 10 or 15 years it will result in significant major proportions of Papua New Guinea's forest being cleared or logged," he said.