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Home A Biodiversity Conservation Plan for Papua New Guinea Based on Biodiversity Trade-offs AnalysisIntroduction As a signatory to the 1992 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, Papua New Guinea is committed to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. Implementation of the Convention points to the importance of the "Ecosystem Approach", which encompasses the goal of balancing biodiversity conservation with other needs of society (for discussion, see IUCN 2000). The Papua New Guinea Rapid Biodiversity Appraisal Pilot Project was commissioned by the Global Environment Fund of the World Bank, and funded by World Bank and AusAID, to help facilitate Papua New Guinea's response to this Convention. The project uses the BioRap toolbox, which provides innovative methods for trade-offs approaches to balance biodiversity conservation and other land uses. This paper follows our final consultancy reports to the World Bank on the BioRap toolbox and its application in PNG (Nix et al. 2000). Companion papers (Nix et al. 2001; Faith et al. 2001a,b) provide background to the project, and describe biodiversity surrogates, target setting, and future implementation issues. The BioRap study was defined within the context of goals to establish a national protected area network and to identify explicit options and constraints for land management within the forestry and agricultural sectors. The objective of this study was to devise a biodiversity conservation plan for Papua New Guinea (PNG), based on a set of biodiversity priority areas. These priority areas are to be subject to ongoing revision by Papua New Guinea Government agencies, in response to land use change, change in economic, social and political conditions, and change in ecological and biological knowledge. The project was also to be an in-country evaluation of the BioRap toolbox for systematic conservation planning. Nix et al. (2000) and Faith et al. (2001a) discuss the biodiversity surrogates, comprising a combination of environmental data and available species data. Nix et al. (2000) have described the environmental database developed for the whole of Papua New Guinea using the ANUDEM and ANUSPLIN packages. This database was defined at a high spatial resolution (approximately 1 km pixels) and consisted of a digital elevation model (DEM), monthly mean climate surfaces and digital lithology. In addition, a biological database comprising 87 selected plant and animal taxa was also constructed, and spatial distributions of each of these taxa were modeled using the BIOCLIM program from the ANUCLIM package (Nix et al. 2000). The BioRap toolbox provides a framework in which biodiversity conservation planning takes into account from the outset other land use needs, so as to achieve a balance between conflicting land use opportunities (Faith et al. 1994; Faith 1995). Conflict between biodiversity conservation and other land use opportunities (particularly logging) is an important consideration in PNG. Many of the areas already designated as suitable for logging contain biodiversity values deserving conservation (Sekhran and Miller 1994). At the same time, any forgone forestry opportunities mean losses not only in royalties for landowners, but also losses to the government in taxes and other revenues (Hunt and Filer 2000). A balance in land use allocation is achieved through trade-offs analysis (Faith 1995). A trade-offs analysis requires appropriate information about land use constraints and opportunity costs of biodiversity conservation. The Papua New Guinea Resource Information System, known as PNGRIS, contains maps and information for the whole country, on current land use, limitations on land use and population density (Bellamy and McAlpine 1995; Keig and Quigley 1995) that contribute to the constraints and preferences information used in our study. The land units for which this information is recorded are the Resource Management Units (RMUs), described further in Faith et al. (2001a). These 4470 units are widely used by government agencies in PNG, so were adopted as the planning allocation units for this Project. Trade-offs are intimately linked to biodiversity targets (Faith et al. 2001a). For this study, we accepted the internationally agreed 10% target as our starting point for determining priority areas for biodiversity protection. This target was converted to a biodiversity goal (see Faith et al 2001a) by asking, "how many environmental domains (groups defined at some level of the hierarchical classification), when combined with a similarly - determined number of vegetation types (intersecting with physico-climatic zones) could be represented if any 10% of PNG could be chosen"? This level of variation turned out to be 608 environmental domains and 564 vegetation. The objective of the actual planning exercise then became to represent this same level of "baseline" variation (the 608 domains, 564 vegetation types, plus 10 species profile clusters and an additional goal of representing 11 rare and threatened species), in the real world of human population pressure, demands for timber and agricultural products, existing protected areas and previous assessments of conservation value. Clearly, factors such as a large total area of degraded land unsuitable for protection, or existing protected areas covering a large area, that are not representative, can mean that a much larger total protected area is needed to achieve representation of that "baseline" variation. The 10%-based target is only seen as an initial international standard or performance indicator, and PNG may adopt a higher target. We also calculated the level of variation that could be represented in 15% of the country as a baseline, and then found which RMUs and how much additional area would be needed to meet that goal in practice. In the following sections, we first report on the trade-offs analyses that address these targets. We then evaluate the results relative to our information on biodiversity, costs and constraints. We also demonstrate how the initial "best set" of biodiversity priority areas can be altered based on new information and changing status of land use. These evaluations and alterations of the initial map highlight the fact that this kind of trade-offs analysis is an ongoing process. Some of the many issues relating to the ongoing implementation of a protected areas system, combined with off-reserve protection and economic incentives, are addressed in Faith et al. (2001b).
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