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Home The BioRap Biodiversity Assessment and Planning Study for Papua New GuineaAuthors
Papua New Guinea (PNG) has an incredible variety of land and marine ecosystems, including many components of biodiversity that are unique in the world. PNG's land mass constitutes less than one percent of the world's land area, yet estimates suggest that the country has more than 5 percent of the world's biodiversity. PNG has been recognized therefore as an important region for biodiversity conservation (see Alcorn 1993; Beehler 1993 and references within). Recently, Conservation International (CI) has recognized PNG as one of the small number of critical tropical forest areas for conservation efforts. That priority reflects not just PNG's unique biodiversity but also the fact that sustainable use of PNG's natural resources has become an important issue, particularly relating to its large mineral deposits, oil and natural gas reserves, agricultural potential, and forestry production potential. CI's perspective highlights important principles of conservation priority. PNG, like the other tropical wilderness areas on its priority list, is regarded as an opportunity for effective conservation at relatively low cost, given that these wilderness regions are still largely intact and have low human population density. In our view, realizing such opportunities requires good planning. Biodiversity conservation in PNG can imply low realized opportunity costs or quite high realized opportunity costs, depending on whether biodiversity planning is used to find a balance among society's competing needs through trade-offs. PNG is a region worthy of urgent conservation planning attention because potential high net benefits for society may be needlessly foreclosed through inefficient planning that does not address conflicts among various needs of society. The risk of losing those potential net benefits is a strong argument for conservation investment in PNG. We indicated above that PNG's total biodiversity wealth can only be estimated. Balanced planning naturally cannot wait for a full assessment of the country's biodiversity components. Rapid assessment of biodiversity is therefore essential for rational allocation of scarce land resources between the competing demands of agriculture, forestry and conservation. BioRap (for Rapid Assessment of Biological Diversity), the focus of the papers in this special issue on PNG, is one response to those needs. Rapid assessment requires careful consideration of how we measure biodiversity. Conservation International and others often emphasize the importance of species-based assessments: "While it has become popular in conservation circles to downplay the importance of species-based data, we believe that this is a fundamental weakness of the field that needs to be corrected." (Mittermeier et al. 1999). The perspective adopted by BioRap is that, while assessments indeed must be "species-based", biodiversity surrogates for such comprehensive information are always needed. Further, we argue that there is no perfect surrogate in any application, and we must make best-possible use of all available information in developing biodiversity surrogates. The BioRap toolbox provides approaches for such best-possible use of available data, combining available species level data with key "abiotic" data. The BioRap Toolbox consists of a set of coordinated analytical tools that can be used to identify, with high spatial resolution, and within a period of one year, priority areas for the conservation and sustainable management of biodiversity. The principal components of the BioRap Toolbox are spatial modeling tools and classification and biodiversity-priority setting tools. The BioRap Toolbox was assembled under the first BioRap Project during 1994-95. This project was carried out under AusAID-World Bank funding, by a Consortium of four Australian scientific and technological agencies: CRES of the Australian National University; CSIRO; the Environmental Resources Information Network (ERIN) and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) (Margules et al. 1995; Faith and Walker 1996a; Hutchinson et al. 1996). The papers in this issue of the journal describe aspects of our first application of BioRap to whole-country planning. The PNG BioRap study is distinctive in several ways. The BioRap tools embody an approach to assessment and planning that is distinguished from others in terms of its objective, process-based methods that are heavily reliant on the 'abiotic' data. These tools support high spatial resolution biodiversity assessments that are readily integrated with existing spatially distributed planning information, as was available for PNG in the form of PNGRIS, the Papua New Guinea Resource Information System. Further, the BioRap approach departs from conventional planning approaches in explicitly treating "opportunity costs" for conservation, not just for land-use allocations, but also for the use of economic instruments such as environmental levies and carbon offsets. The key role of trade-offs in the BioRap approach is evident when it is compared and contrasted with the Critical Ecosystems or "hotspots" program (Faith and Walker, in press). The Critical Ecosystems or hotspots approach excludes trading-off biodiversity with opportunity costs as a strategy for prioritizing regions: "It is important always to keep in mind that a biodiversity priority-setting exercise must focus first and foremost on the biological, and that other criteria such as threat, social and economic factors, political will, feasibility, and the like should be introduced in subsequent layers of analysis. Indeed, we believe that these are most useful in the project design phase, when such factors become particularly relevant" (see http://www.conservation.org/hotspots/). In contrast, BioRap introduces socio-economic factors along with biodiversity at the earliest stage of analysis. Faith and Walker reconcile the BioRap approach with the hotspots perspective by arguing that the use of socio-economic factors only at the "project design" phase can be interpreted as compatible with the use of trade-offs to determine which areas within a given region are to be protected for biodiversity conservation. In that sense, PNG is a biodiversity "hotspot" that consequently demands balanced biodiversity planning. Further comparisons with other planning approaches are found in the papers in this issue (Faith et al. 2001a,b,c).
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