A Tale of Two Forests

A terrestrial plant that survives in salt water, mangroves are a sort of marvel. Acre for acre, mangrove forests can sequester three to five times more carbon than a terrestrial tropical forest. Mangroves also stabilize the coastline, providing a buffer against storm surges and flooding and preventing excess sediment from running into the sea, where it may smother coral reefs. They provide habitat for fish, reptiles and birds. And those are important to Papua New Guineans, which is why TNC is helping local communities lead the way in their conservation.

Since Maniwavie was born in 1987, Papua New Guinea’s capital, Port Moresby, has more than doubled in size; it’s now home to 400,000 people. In many ways, though, the nearby inlet known as Bootless Bay feels much the same as it did when she was a girl, tagging along on research expeditions with her father, a marine biologist at University of Papua New Guinea. “Every time I come here it connects me back to where I started,” she says.

But Bootless Bay has also changed. People have inadvertently killed mangroves by digging up their roots to collect blood worms, a valuable fish bait. Woodcutting for fuel and construction has also taken its toll, as has a decade of coastal development. Meanwhile, higher tides driven by climate change upset the balance between salt water and fresh water.

“It’s painful to watch something get degraded,” Maniwavie says, “especially if you know people don’t really understand the importance of it.”

Maniwavie is not simply watching, however. She leads Mangoro Market Meri, a program that encourages Papua New Guinean women (“meri”) to be stewards of the country’s mangroves. Founded in 2016 at a TNC conference that brought together women from across the region, the program connects communities with economic opportunities that let them benefit from nearby mangrove forests without depleting them. At present, that includes sustainably harvesting mud crabs, crustaceans the size of a dinner plate that are in high demand at area seafood markets. The program hopes to link local people with carbon credit initiatives, which could infuse this developing region with global cash. “That provides an incentive to conservation,” Maniwavie says.

It’s also vital that women be at the center of the effort. Throughout the Asia-Pacific region, women make up a majority of the population using mangroves. They have a wealth of knowledge about the species of mangrove in their areas and the health of the ecosystem generally. “But then there’s the reality that many communities in Papua New Guinea that you go to, it’s a patriarchal society, and women are not necessarily part of the decision-making process,” Maniwavie says. “So we work with communities to empower the women.”

Three hundred miles north of Bootless Bay in mountainous Madang Province, TNC is helping rural people organize to assert their land rights and protect a very different sort of forest.

“We’ve always looked at conservation, conservation, conservation,” says Cosmas Apelis, who leads TNC’s efforts here. “But you have to take people into consideration, because they are the stewards of the land.”

Madang is a place where people’s lives are not much different from their ancestors’. “The forest is our livelihood,” says Lawrence Micah, who has lived his entire 50 years in the village of Simbukanam. “It’s our food, it’s our hospital, and everything.” He is the chairman of the Gildipasi Conservation Group, an association that represents local villages to give them a stronger collective voice in regional issues. He has witnessed virgin forest cut down by companies that had dubious reputations and even more dubious logging permissions. His goal is to see local land-use rules formalized and recognized by the provincial government.

He, TNC and other conservation groups are working with community members to develop land use plans that preserve the forests for the long term. With little involvement from the regional or national governments, they abide by customary property rights, under which the people living nearby are the land’s owners and caretakers.

However, resisting logging companies' well-funded operations requires local people to stand together—and get creative. Apelis relates the story of a community that recently discovered a logging operation had encroached illegally onto its land.

“It came to a head where they had had enough,” Apelis says. “The company had left all the logging machinery, all the trucks and all that, lined them on the highway. So the people came and took all the keys. And so the police had to come in, and the provincial government had to step in, because people said, ‘We are not going to give back the keys until the government comes and explains why it isn’t doing monitoring and enforcement.’ They put their foot down, and that’s when they got respect.”

The Nature Conservancy aids local communities by lending surveying expertise as they formalize their customary land rights and record the locations of critical resources like streams. The organization is also supporting local people in their campaigns to arrange community-wide conservation pledges. Sometimes local leaders disagree about conservation goals, but the discourse among neighboring communities often makes for stronger resolutions in the end.

Micah is optimistic that the agreements and some new farming prospects will offset the pressure from outside logging companies. The Conservancy is also connecting people with sustainable economic opportunities—it’s easier to turn down a logging company’s offer to buy your timber rights when you have an alternative source of revenue. New village-based savings and loans have helped entrepreneurs build businesses. Some communities are pursuing organic certification for cash crops like cocoa, coconuts and vanilla. Eventually, TNC also hopes to link communities to nature-based solutions such as the international carbon market, which will help them generate income by conserving their forests.

“Conservation should be a development tool,” Apelis says. In Papua New Guinea, that’s a theme that runs from the mountains all the way to the sea (“ridges to reefs,” as many of TNC’s Pacific staffers like to put it). “We build the capacity for people to do conservation, but at the same time, we help empower them economically.”

“We know what mangroves bring into our lives.” 

In Bootless Bay, one of the businesses that Mangoro Market Meri supports is Karikari Mangrove Nursery, which Dulcie Egu and her father, Koivi, founded last year after receiving training through TNC. With guidance from Maniwavie, they and their mostly female employees are growing mangrove saplings. The community-based nurseries in Bootless Bay have helped replant more than 3,000 mangroves. Over the next decade, Mangoro Market Meri, which buys the baby mangroves from the nurseries for about a dollar each, aims to plant at least 200,000 more.

“We live here, and we know the importance of mangrove,” Dulcie says, standing beside a greenhouse that shelters hundreds of propagules. “We know what mangroves bring into our lives. ... When we cut it down today, if we don’t replace it, then in the future our children will suffer.”

In addition to serving as a source of food and wood, Dulcie explains, mangroves protect against floods. She shrugs: Helping them just makes sense.

It makes Maniwavie proud. As women plant mangroves in Bootless Bay, and as mountain villages rally around preserving the tropical rainforest, Papua New Guineans take seriously their role as caretakers. “It gives me hope,” Maniwavie says. “The fact that the community takes ownership and the initiative to do the restoration work by themselves, it’s changing the tide. Nobody can do it better than themselves.”