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Commons were traditionally associated with rural societies, but socioeconomic changes have triggered new forms of commons linked with urban areas. Despite an emerging literature on these new commons and their connection to landscape management, more knowledge is needed. This study focuses on various forms of commons and their contribution to...

Although it is widely acknowledged that forests provide critical ecosystem services for human survival and well-being, in the Asia-Pacific region forests are being converted to other land uses and degraded at alarming rates. One underlying factor for this destruction of forests is market failure. Forests are cleared for other land uses or degraded...

Recognising the importance of markets to sustainable forest management, this document provides guidance to timber buyers on the steps that they can take to responsibly purchase Papua New Guinean export timber. Log exports have been a major foreign exchange earner for PNG, but weak enforcement of forest laws means that the forest estate is mostly...

This report aims to contribute to the management of PNG’s forests as a renewable natural asset for the collective benefit of all Papua New Guineans. It argues that to achieve these ends, illegalities in the forest sector need serious attention. The report aims to (i) provide a review of the illegal logging issue in PNG, (ii) identify the potential...

This report provides a review of national REDD+ readiness processes in PNG, covering a broad range of issues, from features of forest cover, drivers of deforestation and forest degradation, development of the REDD+ strategy, the organisational set up for REDD+ readiness, financing of readiness activities, MRV and REL, and demonstration activities.

The Forest Conservation Project is researching forest certification as an instrument to assist communities to manage forests for multiple purposes, including timber production. This research has focused on innovative models that could suggest ways of increasing the accessibility of forest certification to community-based forest management. The...

Despite reform of forest law to embrace the concept of sustainable forest management and the development of a raft of subordinate regulations/guidelines to implement the Forestry Act, forests in Papua New Guinea (PNG) continue to be degraded by industrial-scale commercial logging operations. Numerous independent reports over the past two decades...

This report presents the results of IGES research on public timber procurement policy to date. It includes a comparative analysis between Japan’s policy and those of several European countries. In addition to providing recommendations for further strengthening Japan’s policy, the report identifies a generic set of elements that public timber...