Source: No to Wafi Golpu DSTP

The Deep Sea Mining Campaign warns that if nodule mining is allowed to take place in the Pacific Ocean, species such as the Sperm Whale could be adversely affected. Photo: WILLYAM

Source: RNZ/Pacific news.

Papua New Guinea’s long-awaited Independent Commission Against Corruption must be allocated substantial funding in the 2023 Budget if the government is to make good on its anti-corruption promises.

The Prime Minister has promised a fully functioning ICAC by 2023, but there are two crucial pieces of the jigsaw that are missing.

First is a substantial budget allocation and the second is the appointment of the first Commissioner and their Deputies.

Carbon trading, which is being heavily promoted in Papua New Guinea, will not help reduce global warming and instead risks implicating indigenous communities in the obsessive overconsumption in wealthier countries that is destroying the planet. 

Carbon trading is just one more example of greenwashing being used by big corporations and foreign governments to cover up their failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions and their ongoing destruction of the natural environment.

The Tavolo Community Conservation Association from East New Britain have won a major victory against a Malaysian logging company that has been threatening to log their customary forests.

The National Court has granted the Association a temporary injunction suspending a Forest Clearance Authority granted to Mekar (PNG) Limited by the PNG Forest Authority and stopping any large-scale conversion of forest to agriculture or other land use.

Nearly 70% of Papua New Guinea’s round log exports between 2019 and 2021 were concentrated in the hands of just ten groups of companies, all with strong links to Malaysia, according to new research by Act Now! and Jubilee Australia Research Centre.

In 1989, after chairing a two-year Commission of Inquiry, Justice Barnett described forest management in PNG as being in a state of chaos. He declared that foreign-owned logging companies were being allowed to operate as they pleased as a result of bribery and the corruption of State officials and politicians.