Papua New Guinea in Context. PNG is home to one of just four large, intact tropical forest wilderness areas remaining on Earth, with over 30 million hectares of old growth forests. An astounding 50 percent of PNG’s plants (approximately 15,000 species in total) are endemic.

This extraordinary resource is threatened primarily by large-scale and destructive industrial practice, especially through unregulated, clear-fell logging of lowland forest and related conversion of forest areas to oil palm plantation. However, it is acknowledged that forest is also being lost through pressures caused by a growing population, a rapid society-wide shift from subsistence to a cash economy, and mounting pressures to meet education, health, food, and other development needs.

In PNG, private landowners control 97 percent of the land in traditional clan-based ownership. Thus, conventional, ‘Northern’ approaches to conservation—focused around large, state-managed protected areas— have very limited application in PNG. These land tenure conditions, combined with the lack of a strong central government, leave forest, mangrove and coral reefs protection largely in the hands of landowners with small holdings. To be effective, efforts to support conservation initiatives in PNG must focus at the landowner level.

Regrettably, landowners have not been empowered to lead conservation efforts in PNG. Lacking adequate tools, capacity, and awareness, landowners have been unable to redress these problems, and have generally regarded conservation and sustainable development as a low priority. Because land is held under customary ownership, there are additional challenges in securing the long-term, legal protection of PNG’s incredibly important natural areas. Mama Graun was created to address this issue of empowerment of local resource owners to manage critical protected areas in PNG.

This background of the PNG context is the very reason why most attempt to develop conservation areas has failed in the last 30 years in PNG as expectations from the targeted communities with a western approach raised rapidly high expectation, communities seeing all the material used by external organization (4X4, boats, diving gears, etc) and none of this for them. This created conflicts and make work impossible and organization were throw out or banned from the area. Mama Graun has learned from these experiences and foremost is a local organization that has stringent rules and process to give out grant or for groups to access its money.

In developing this project, Mama Graun has been very careful of avoiding the “cargo cult” mentality that prevails in many communities throughout PNG where communities expect funding and goods to be delivered rather then, having the communities involved in the decision making and ensuring delivery of services. The delivery of these incentives will be carefully designed to integrate the community development process, the increase of business opportunities and capacities with each incentive. Each of these incentives will be assessed with the perspective of the recurrent cost that will be needed to secure the long term conservation agreement.

Mama Graun is acutely aware that the propose incentives need to be continued beyond the life of this Lifeweb proposal and consequently has initiated the creation of a Stewardship Endowment fund to address the long term recurrent cost of managing protected areas and in the context of PNG, continue to provide incentives to communities for their conservation work on their land that has been declared with their consent Protected Areas. << Read less

Rehabilitate at least 17 priority PAs, Implement a range of incentives related to health, education, water, electricity, agriculture, and communications to indigenous communities managing PAs, Develop a Management Plan and strong Management Committee in each PA, Expand the concept of resilient ecosystem based protected areas network from 3 to 5% of the national territory working with communities in 4 large new priority conservation areas to have these areas becoming recognised as Legal Conservation areas during this 5 year project, Commence a PNG Stewardship Endowment Fund to provide for the recurrent cost of incentives and managing all the selected conservation areas.

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Papua New Guinea contains over 5% of the world's biodiversity in less than 1% of the world's total land area. Much of this biodiversity has remained intact for thousands of years because the ruggedness of the terrain made the interior lands inaccessible; furthermore low population density and restrictions on the effectiveness of traditional tools, ensured that these biodiversity was never overexploited. This scenario has changed in the last 100 years as the country entered modernization.

The effort by the PNG government to protect biodiversity has resulted in 57 existing protected areas . These protected areas occupy 3% of the total land area. Included in the PNG protected area list are wildlife management area (WMA) which seeks to conserve biological diversity by involving local landowners. Most of the existing protected areas are small in size and were created to protect specific resource and or cultural sites and lack any ecosystems connectivity or sustainability or ecosystems representation of the country.

In this project Mama Graun effort to support the larger protected areas such as Maza, Kamiali, Pirung and Crater Mountain is to ensure that there is ecosystems viability and connectivity. Further as you can see from the map provided, our efforts attempt to ensure that areas Mama Graun supports are representative of the country’s rich biodiversity.

The new areas to be supported by this project, not only increases the protected areas coverage for PNG, it also strengthens the local community efforts that have already entered into agreements for smaller protected areas as WMAs. The expansion to large areas ensures ecosystems connectivity and makes smaller existing PAs within larger PAs more sustainable. Of the new areas targeted: Kikori Basin, Nakanai Range, Collingwood Bay and Managalas Plateau have been nominated by PNG government for World Heritage listing, indicating their biodiversity and cultural values to the country. The work under this project will contribute greatly to advance the management and knowledge base needed to make this nomination a reality. Further these are areas nominated as priority for conservation in the 1990s Conservation Needs Assessment and more recently WWFs Ecoregions and TNCs seascapes and landscapes and further reinforced in the country’s NBSAP.

Current Mama Graun conservation program is working towards developing a functioning system of PNG protected areas by taking a lead in systematic capacity building at community level and supporting management planning in all the priority PAs. This is a major contribution to the governments effort to rejuvenate and expand the protected areas in the country. << Read less

Counterpart Funding: Packard Foundation, GEF Small Grant Programme, and anticipated funding from GEF : associated co-financing from Highland Province and other PNG Provinces,

Institutional Commitment: The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund, Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI), Mama Graun Conservation Trust Fund, Micronesia Conservation Trust, University of Papua New Guinea, PNG National Research Institute,

Sustainable Financing Mechanism: Mama Graun Stewardship fund
The idea of creating a Stewardship Endowment comes from the Melanesian concept of stewardship, under which land is passed from one generation to the next in the same condition that it was received. Mama Graun Stewardship Fund will allows the selected priority conservation areas to continue to received incentives that supported the management of the conservation areas over the long term after the initial investment period, to meet international standards for biodiversity sustainability as assessed by Mama Graun.

Operation of the Mama Graun PNG Stewardship Fund
In the case of an Endowment, revenue from a financial investment will be used to pay for the recurrent costs of a selected area. However, this money is not guaranteed to flow to the relevant community unless they continue to undertake agreed conservation activities. This money will supplement other funds generated out of the activities of the Protected Area, and each area will be encouraged to become autonomous from the Stewardship funding through various incentive mechanisms. When an area becomes self sufficient, the Stewardship funds initially earmarked for that area will move to support the long term recurrent costs of the next selected priority area. It is however understood that not all Protected Areas will become self sufficient, depending on their location and accessibility.

Each of these incentives will be assessed with the perspective of the recurrent cost that will be needed to secure the long term conservation agreement. It is the hope of MGCTF that these recurrent minimal costs would be taken by a national REDD or PES scheme that will be developed, where MGCTF could play a leading role as fiduciary agent for these communities. << Read less

As mentioned above, in Melanesia all the conservation work is done primarily by the land, sea and resources users of the place. All elements of this proposal are to empower land, sea and resources users to manage conservation areas on the long term. Mama Graun as already started to address the concept of incentives to lock long term conservation in selected areas. As mentioned above, Mama Graun concept is to have the whole community to benefit from incentives instead of Individual. Also, in the PNG context, woman generally do not participate in the traditional decision making process. However, by including the Church as a main partner, it change the dynamics of women’s participation as women church groups are well mobilized. Mama Graun will support the integration of environmental issues to be part of women’s church work. In this way women can also have an impact of the decision making on environmental issues.

This action will support national, provincial and local level governments agencies, resource managers, and communities to work together to make conservation of irreplaceable biodiversity will be secured for the long term. The Mama Graun community-based management approach utilized involves multiple stakeholders in participatory, decision-making processes. This approach secures local management of protected areas, helping to ensure greater long-term sustainability and more equitable sharing of benefits. Although road access, weather condition, remoteness and capacity are a challenge to effectively managing some of these 21 selected areas, the provision of additional financial and human resources will greatly change the conservation dynamic in PNG were conservation has been so neglected for so many years. This program will ensure through Mama Graun that the selected Conservation Areas have the resources they need to manage appropriately their conservation areas, conduct monitoring and enforcement.

With this project Mama Graun will offer to all stakeholders the chance to work together, national, provincial and local agencies to work collaboratively with NGO, private sector and communities to achieve the vision of a sustained bounty of life that nourish the communities and the whole nation. << Read less

This proposal is congruent with the following current national sustainable development planning frameworks as well as conservation priorities of international conservation partners :

• Papua New Guinea NBSAP – Mama Graun is identified as a key partner in the implementation
• PNG National Plan of Action for the Coral Triangle Initiative – Mama Graun is a key partner in implementation
• PNG Medium Term Development Strategy which is the implementation of the Global MDG
• WWF Ecoregions
• TNC National Conservation Assessment
• CI – Key Biodiversity Areas << Read less

Goal 1.4: To substantially improve site-based protected area planning and management
Goal 2.1: To promote equity and benefit-sharing
Goal 2.2: To enhance and secure involvement of indigenous and local communities and relevant stakeholders
Goal 3.2: To build capacity for the planning, establishment and management of protected areas
Goal 3.4: To ensure financial sustainability of protected areas and national and regional systems of protected areas
Goal 4.1 - To develop and adopt minimum standards and best practices for national and regional protected area systems
Goal 4.3: To assess and monitor protected area status and trends
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