DOUBT has been cast on Australia's planned emissions trading scheme by research on Papua New Guinea forests. The research finds PNG may have limited capacity to sell carbon credits to countries such as Australia because it soon may not have much accessible forest left. It finds PNG's forests are being destroyed considerably faster than previously believed, and 83% of its accessible forests will be destroyed within 13 years if these rates continue. "The current state of forest management and lack of effective governance means that PNG is a long way from being able to meaningfully participate in the carbon economy," the research concluded. It found that logging in protected areas, such as national parks, was happening at the same rate as in unprotected areas.

"Government officials may claim they wish rich countries to pay them for conserving their forests, but if they are allowing multinational timber companies to take everything that's accessible, all that will be left will be lands that are physically inaccessible to exploitation and would never have been logged anyway," the report's lead author, Phil Shearman, of the University of PNG, said. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the Government's principal adviser on greenhouse gas emissions, Professor Ross Garnaut, have held out the prospect of Australian companies financing the protection of PNG forests through buying carbon credits.

Professor Garnaut told a conference in Port Moresby yesterday that PNG had the potential to become the world's first carbon-neutral country, but only if it addressed the threats to its forests. "The first step, and most important, is PNG has to take a decision that it is really serious about effective forest management," he said. Mr. Rudd signed a forest carbon partnership in early March with his PNG counterpart, Sir Michael Somare, saying a private carbon market could pay PNG for protecting its forests. "It is a legitimate aspiration for us to have, because PNG doing its bit for the world through avoided deforestation is very important," Mr. Rudd said at the time. The report, The State of the Forests of Papua New Guinea, took five years. It used high-resolution satellite imagery to compare forest cover in 1972 and 2002. It found that subsistence agriculture, fires and the development of mines and plantations were contributing to deforestation. Dr Colin Filer, of the ANU, was critical of the report's findings. He said it seemed to assume forest regrowth or reforestation had come to a halt. The claim that half of PNG's forests could be gone by 2021 was a gross exaggeration.