State of the forests of Papua New Guinea

"The report, was produced by scientists at the University of Papua New Guinea Remote Sensing Centre and their colleagues at the Australian National University. The researchers spent five years carefully analyzing satellite images that document 30 years of destruction in an area that contains a major portion of the world’s third largest tropical forest. Only the Amazon and Congo forests are bigger.
They estimate that in 2001, Papua New Guinea’s accessible forests were being cleared or degraded at a rate of 362,000 hectares a year – amounting to a combined annual rate of deforestation and degradation of 1.41 percent. At that pace, by 2021, the authors estimate that 83 percent of the country’s accessible forest (and 53 percent of its total forested area) will be gone or severely damaged. Scientists at the UPNG Remote Sensing Centre discovered that even in so-called conservation “protected areas” forest destruction is occurring at the same pace as in unprotected regions."