What drives deforestation in New Guinea ?
New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island, hosts extensive old-growth forests, including mangroves and peat swamps. It has more plant species than any other tropical island. It is also home to diverse human cultures, each with their own relationship to nature, and until recently human impacts have been small.
The island is divided – in the west, the provinces of West Papua and Papua make up Indonesian New Guinea, known as Tanah Papua and in the east, it is the independent country of Papua New Guinea.
In our new study published on 07 September 2021 in Biological Conservation, we used satellite imagery to examine annual forest loss, road development and plantation expansion from 2001 to 2019, then developed a model to predict future deforestation.
Eighty-three per cent of Tanah Papua remained forest in 2019. This area represents 42% of Indonesia’s forests and is the Asia Pacific region’s largest area of intact old-growth forest.
The model predicts 4.5 million hectares (Mha) – around 13% of the total 34.29 Mha of forest – could disappear by 2036 if Tanah Papua follows the same trajectory as Kalimantan. That’s a result of the development of thousands of kilometres of highway in a project known as “Trans Papua”. Further reading here
