Sustaining indigenous forests with Blockchain Technology in Papua New Guinea

REDD+ & helping reduce emissions with blockchain technology

Virgin rain forest in Papua New Guinea

By PETER S KINJAP | PNG Attitude blog

PORT MORESBY – Deforestation is responsible for up to 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions and is crucial for the international community to achieve its goal of keeping global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Papua New Guinea is the world’s second largest island with a landmass of 46 million hectares, of which 29 million are virgin forest. PNG is second only to Brazil in having the largest tropical rainforest still intact.

Legally, land in PNG is owned by the indigenous people. Only 3% was acquired by the government during the colonial period and 97% is recognized by the Customary Land Registration Act for customary landowners.

PNG also has large mineral deposits and currently exports gold, copper, nickel, oil, liquefied natural gas and other resources in which customary landowners are important stakeholders.

Meanwhile, Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index reveals that PNG is one of the most corrupt nations in the world, much of the corruption involving illegal land grabbing.

The country’s biggest land scandal has been triggered by Special Agriculture and Business Lease (SABL) agreements. Using the pretext of promising customary landowners agricultural, the government has used many of these SABL leases for other commercial purposes.

This has all occurred without a proper policy framework in place, enabling ‘carbon cowboys’ to illegally use the land for their own purposes.

The government established a climate change office in 2010 but it soon came under public scrutiny for its dubious activities and was condemned by international observers.

According to leaked documents, the government pre-sold carbon credits for almost four years prior to 2009 without a framework being in place or proper legal documentation.

A gardening site near the Kuk heritage area  in Western Highlands Province

In 2014, the climate change office changed its name to the Climate Change and Development Authority (CCDA), with new management taking over.

The hope was to curb out corruption and implement an agreement known as REDD+, a global effort to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and to foster conservation, sustainable forest management and enhancement of forest carbon stocks

Even though the PNG government is now trying to seize back the SABL leases and return the land to customary landowners, the effectiveness of this, and of CCDA, is questionable as is the implementation of REDD+.

Papua New Guinea’s greenhouse gas emissions mostly come from land use and forestry. As a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, it is a requirement that PNG reduces these emissions. But reducing emissions from deforestation and the degradation of forests will be neither cheap nor easy.

But is has been stated that, in the midst of illegal land grabbing and carbon corruption, blockchain technology can potentially be beneficial to PNG communities.

A decentralized public blockchain-based offsetting and compensation mechanism for indigenous communities in PNG to sustain their forested land with REDD+ mitigation instruments is already mooting to the aid of indigenous landowners.

Scheduled to be officially launched this year, T4G PNG project is an autonomous nonprofit private project designed to implement REDD+ programs in Papua New Guinea.

With REDD+, it provides a distributed ledger payment mechanism to assist landowners gets their royalty payment in full and provides accountability and transparency on the transactions.

With a secured database to house big data on customary land in PNG with genealogical links to their bloodlines, sacred sites, linages, maps and traditional significant sites. By far, it remains as an alternative source of ILG data and customary land title information on a digital platform. 

Acts as an escrow to collect donations from travelers worldwide and provide incentives to indigenous landowners to sustain the standing forests and planting new trees.

The T4G PNG project also act as the plaintiff in the environmental damage litigation against polluters and share the rewards with other plaintiffs including ILGs and indigenous communities as well as providing a consensus mechanism of ILG members to nominate and elect individual members to have legitimacy of ILG land title investment decisions. 

No customary land is individually owned and thus this project provides the platform required to assist for consensus decision making.

 ILGs comprised of many people who own the land and thus the land title which can be easily tempered with by individuals and thus a consensus decision needed to be made for deals in investments of and with the title.            

Overall, T4G PNG is a digital platform (supported by IPCI and Airalab) to implement REDD+ programs in Papua New Guinea in association with CCDA for UNFCCC.

Peter S Kinjap is a freelance writer and an advocate for the T4G PNG project. For more information and technical detail you can email Peter here: pekinjap@gmail.com