Land grab, logging, mining threaten biodiversity

haven of Woodlark Island

by Gianluca Cerullo on 1 October 2020

 Woodlark Island lies off the coast of Papua New Guinea and is home to dozens of
unique species and a more than 2,000-year-old human culture.
 A recent court ruling has seen the land rights granted to Woodlark islanders in 2016
revoked and returned to an agricultural company that in 2007 planned to
transform 70% of the island into oil palm plantations.
 Meanwhile, the status of an application submitted to the PNG Forest Authority by a
logging company to clear 40% of the island under the guise of an agricultural
project remains unknown, despite an ongoing petition signed by more than 184,00
people.
 A mining company has also started expanding infrastructure and clearing forest in
preparation for a long-planned open-pit gold mine, but has faced backlash from
villagers unhappy with the replacement housing offered as part of a relocation
project to make way for the mine. The company also intends to dispose of mining
waste via a controversial pipeline into a nearby bay.

A unique rainforest island lying 270 kilometers (168 miles) off Papua New
Guinea is once again at the center of a tug-of-war between multiple extractive
industries vying for its rich natural resources. Woodlark Island is home to
dozens of species found nowhere else on Earth, but faces numerous
overlapping threats from gold mining expansion and looming potential
agricultural and logging projects.

After a hard-won battle to regain customary land ownership over their New York
City-sized island, Woodlark islanders recently faced a major land rights setback.
A court has effectively revoked the islanders’ customary ownership over some
70% of Woodlark, returning the mostly forested area as a lease to Carter
Holdings Limited.

The company, formerly known as Vitroplant Limited, was the driving force
behind a thwarted attempt to establish a large-scale biofuel project on
Woodlark in 2007.
Meanwhile, Woodlark still faces ambiguous threats from Malaysian-owned
logging company Kulawood Limited, which has submitted a forest clearance
application to the Papua New Guinean Forest Authority.

Woodlark Island, also called Muyua Island, lies about 300 kilometers (186 miles) east of
the Papua New Guinea mainland.

The forest clearance application covers 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) — around
40% of the island’s forest — but its status is unclear. This is despite an ongoing
petition signed by more than 184,000 people calling on the Forest Authority to
halt the deforestation. A similar petition launched earlier this year garnered
some 228,000 signatures.

An Australian mining company has also started expanding infrastructure on

Woodlark. Geopacific Resources Limited, however, has been forced to halt a
planned relocation project after locals rejected the living facilities provided by
the company. The planned relocation is part of an attempt to move some 250
families from Kulumadau village to make way for a mining plant and open-pit
gold mine.

Scientists worry this melee of developments will spell disaster for Woodlark’s
unique biodiversity, and the thousands of people who call the island home.

An island like no other

Hopping onto Woodlark Island, the first thing a biologist might notice are the
absences.

Gone are the colorful flashes and calls of birds-of-paradise, which have helped
establish New Guinea as an ornithologist’s dreamland. They likely never reached
the remote island. Gone too are the wallabies, the bowerbirds and a whole slew
of other wildlife famous on the mainland.

Instead, Woodlark has its own set of evolutionary oddballs. There’s the
Woodlark cuscus (Phalanger lullulae), a tree-living marsupial listed as
endangered on the IUCN Red List that ekes out its existence in hollows, chewing
on insects.

The island also has seven known endemic reptile species, seven plants, seven
amphibians, two damselflies and a riffle bug, all found nowhere else on Earth.

As Fred Kraus, a herpetologist at the University of Michigan with expertise of the

island’s fauna, calls it a “lot of endemics for one small island.”

“The island is quite isolated and has been for several million years, so there has
been no recent gene flow with relatives on the closest landmasses,” Kraus said.

Left to evolve in seclusion, the staggering diversity of Woodlark’s fauna is

demonstrated perhaps best of all by an often overlooked group: its snails.

Woodlark’s snails flaunt a hodgepodge of psychedelic shell formations: some

spiky, others smooth, all a fascinating natural experiment on the many ways to
build a palace out of calcium carbonate.

A few have range sizes so small that of the planet’s 13 billion hectares (32 billion
acres) or so of landmass, the only place they probably exist are in a few hundred
square meters of Woodlark Island forest.
“Of the approximately 40 [species of] land snails I found on the island, about
half are found nowhere else on the planet and half of these are new to science
and are still awaiting formal description and naming,” John Slapcinsky of the
Florida Museum of Natural History previously told Mongabay.

One of the endemic snails only found on Woodlark Island. Image by John Slapcinsky.

The lesson, shown to be true again and again on Woodlark Island, is that you’ll
find new species if you just know how to look.

In 2016, scientists described a new frog from Woodlark in the

journal Zooystematics and Evolution. They heralded it as a “striking new species
of the microhylid frog genus Mantophryne,” and announced that, like the mineral
deposits that run in the ground beneath its toepads, M. insignis  had an eye-
catching stream of gold running down its back.

Kraus also recently described a new species of gecko from

Woodlark, Lepidodactylus kwasnickae.  

“L. kwasnickae seems utterly dependent on the forest,” Kraus told Mongabay. “All
of the endemics I know of are dependent on the forest habitat because that was
the original land cover before humans came in and started clearing”

Yet much of this unique wildlife now faces an extremely uncertain future.

The return of an old enemy?

Back in 2007, Woodlark Island found itself at the center of local and
international efforts to stop the wholesale destruction of its forests. The threat
came after a Malaysian-owned company, Vitroplant, acquired a lease to develop
a large-scale biofuel project on the island.

Vitroplant intended to clear 70% of the island’s forest (around 60,000 hectares,
or 148,000 acres) to make way for a monoculture oil palm plantation, a move
that scientists feared would cause spiraling extinctions among Woodlark’s
unique fauna. The biofuel project sparked a firestorm of opposition at the
time. This included fears from islanders worried about what sweeping
deforestation and pollution would mean for their subsistence-based culture and
the forests they depend on.

Following a global letter-writing campaign, targeted journalistic scrutiny and,

most importantly, organized opposition from Woodlark Islanders, something
very rare happened: the Papua New Guinean government put a halt to the
project. The planned destruction of the island’s forest was thwarted. It looked
like Vitroplant’s designs for Woodlark Island had been thwarted.

More than 10 years on, that no longer seems to be the case.

After changing its name to Carter Holdings, Vitroplant won a legal case to regain
ownership of its former agricultural leases over large portions of Woodlark. The
decision comes as a heavy blow to islanders, who have been fighting for
recognition of their customary land rights for more than 50 years.

In November 2016, it seemed that Vitroplant’s claim on Woodlark was well and
truly over, with islanders celebrating a landmark ruling by the national
government, which appeared to finally recognize their land rights.

The ruling was announced by then-Prime Minister Peter O’Neill and was met by
a joyous ceremony attended by residents from across Woodlark and
surrounding islands, as well as government officials and visiting dignitaries. The
minister of land at the time, Benny Allen, unveiled a plaque at the government
station on Woodlark commemorating the occasion.

But that plaque now seems to have been rendered obsolete, and the islanders
are once again facing a takeover of most of their island. For even as Woodlark’s
inhabitants were celebrating the return of their customary lands, Carter
Holdings had submitted a judicial review at Waigani National Court, claiming it
still held the titles to three state leases on Woodlark, totaling 60,400 hectares
(149,250 acres) of mostly forested area.

Then, on Feb. 22, 2019, the court ruled in favor of Carter Holdings to quash the
designation of its former leases first as “government land,” and then as
“customary land.” The verdict effectively restored Carter Holdings as the legal
owner of some 70% of Woodlark Island’s land area.

Isi Henry Leonard, a member of parliament who represents Woodlark and the
island of Samarai, has pushed to revive the case for customary land ownership
on Woodlark. He says the court ruling came about because of a failure by
government lawyers to push back against Carter Holdings’ claims.

“The Court did not take the evidence file by the Lands Department into
consideration and only relied on the evidence [of land ownership] presented by
Carter Holdings Limited,” Leonard said during a televised meeting in 2019.

He said he’s worried what the repeal of customary land rights will mean for
Woodlark’s residents, who could now be sidelined by any future projects on the
island.

“Carter Holdings will be the major beneficiary [of any future projects] because of
the fact that they have the lease,” Leonard said. “And the landowners? Forget
about it. If ever they sign an agreement between the state and the company, it
will have no direct meaning to the people of Woodlark, even though they are
landowners. They will be sidelined. They will be signing an agreement that will
never affect their lives.”

But what kinds of projects are at play on Woodlark Island?

A tangled web of plans to clear a rainforest island

It’s unclear whether Carter Holdings intends to revive its 2007 bid to develop an
oil palm plantation on Woodlark Island. Mongabay tried to reach Carter
Holdings for comment, but contact information for the company is not publicly
available.
Luke Petai, who grew up on the island, says he’s not aware of any current
planned agricultural projects, but that “it is quite difficult to know of plans as in
most cases, it is not discussed until when everything is set for operations … that
is when we know of those plans.”

Previous assessments by the Department of Agriculture have also shown that

soil suitability for oil palm across Woodlark is very low — though this has largely
not prevented the expansion of oil palm in many similarly ill-suited areas of
Southeast Asia.

It’s also unclear how Carter Holdings’ lease interacts with the web of intentions
of other extractive industries crisscrossed around the island.

Woodlark already houses an expanding gold mine, which is the main employer
for islanders and seems to fall outside of Carter Holding’s leases. But Woodlark
has also recently been the focus for another Malaysian-owned company,
Kulawood.

As Mongabay reported last year, Kulawood previously submitted plans to clear-

cut 30,000 hectares of forest on Woodlark, an act scientists warn would destroy
the island’s forests and doom many of its endemic species.

All the animals above are only found on Woodlark Island. Image by Fred Kraus.
Kulawood reportedly intends the planned forest clearance to be part of a wider
agricultural project called the Woodlark Integrated Agriculture and Forest
Plantation Project. The company says it plans to plant a mixture of rubber and
cocoa trees that will benefit locals after the deforestation.

However, a four-part series led by investigative outlet PNGi in 2018 found that

Kulawood’s forest clearance application was “riddled with errors, inconsistencies
and false information.”

What’s more, PNGi discovered that the company’s local partner, which is tasked
with implementing the project, was granted approval by the Department of
Agriculture in March 2017 despite having no previous experience with logging or
agricultural development, no registered assets, and no staff.

Sources say this points toward a potentially illicit attempt by Kulawood to use
agricultural development as a ruse to mask industrial logging operations on the
island, which still has large stands of slow-growing ebony hardwoods. Such
ruses are not unique to Woodlark, with companies routinely using agricultural
loopholes to get around Papua New Guinea’s logging restrictions.

Despite an ongoing petition now signed by more than 184,000 people asking the
PNG Forest Authority to cancel the project, the status of Kulawood’s forest
clearance application remains unknown. Neither Kulawood nor the Forest
Authority responded to Mongabay’s attempts to contact them.

However, it is now clear that should Kulawood’s logging plans proceed, a large
part of its activities would have to fall within the leases returned to Carter
Holdings.

Gold mining and the relocation of Kulumadau village

Meanwhile, longstanding efforts to expand gold mining are underway on

Woodlark and facing controversies of their own.

Australian mining company Geopacific Resources announced in October

2019 that it had succeeded in raising $40 million in financing to begin
preparation of multiple open-pit gold mines on Woodlark.
Photos and announcements on Geopacific’s website show that by February
2020, it had landed machinery on the island and started clearing plant sites as
well as constructing more than 4 km (2.5 mi) of new roads.

Geopacific also began plans to relocate around 250 families from one of the
island’s most densely inhabited villages, Kulumadua, which is located on a major
gold prospecting site.

Kulamadau is situated near the center of Woodlark Island.

In 2019, Ron Heeks, Geopacific’s managing director at the time, said that the

company had “made a commitment to engage as many Woodlark residents as
possible for all aspects of the project, including the Kulumadau relocation.”

Yet in June 2020 Geopacific halted the relocation and Heeks allegedly was forced
to resign after reports surfaced that the company failed to provide adequate
housing alternatives for some 1,500 displaced residents.

“These kit homes are no match to our local homes built with bush material,”
Bosco Lapis, a spokesperson for the Woodlark relocation committee, told a local
news outlet.

Lapis said certain house designs consisted of only a single room, were not
equipped with enough water storage facilities to sustain a family’s weekly usage,
and were built with materials that locals would not be able to source and
maintain once the mining company left the area.

Geopacific has since ceased the construction of the smaller dwellings and is in

discussions with the Mineral Resources Authority (MRA) of Papua New
Guinea and the Woodlark community to resolve the dispute.

Former islander Luke Petai, however, said not all locals feel they are being
properly consulted about or compensated for the relocation by Geopacific.

“For the general local people including ordinary members of Dal Wanuwan” — a
local landowner group that deals with the developer — “from what I am hearing
from home, they have not been properly consulted,” Petai told Mongabay via
email. “Therefore they feel they are not compensated properly.”

The company also faces growing scrutiny around its plans to dump toxic mining
waste, called tailings, into the ocean. The proposal has attracting mounting
criticism across New Guinea, particularly in the wake of recent disastrous
pipeline spills at the Ramu nickel mine on mainland PNG.

Geopacific has previously attributed the decision to dispose of mining waste

offshore to high rainfall and tectonic activity on the island.

David Mitchell, director of Eco Custodian Advocates, said safer alternatives exist,
including lining mine pits with impermeable barriers then backfilling the waste
within these pits. But Mitchell said he doesn’t believe the company seriously
considered this option during its environmental impact assessment.

“I seem to recall that it was deemed too expensive,” Mitchell told Mongabay. “Yet
in a multi-pit mine it would be an environmental best practice with a lesser
environmental footprint.”
A bulldozer clears land on Woodlark. Image from Geopacific Resources via Youtube.

The impacts of deep-sea mine tailings disposal on ocean life remains mostly
unknown to scientists due to the difficulty of surveying such environments.
However, a paper published in Scientific Reports  in 2015 found that large-scale
dumping of gold mine tailings had severe impacts across the web of deep-sea
marine life on nearby Misima Island.

Geopacific did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment.

What now for Woodlark?

“To us, the forest and the surrounding environment is a lifeline,” Petai said. “It
holds our cultural heritage, the source of our living and is the platform of
interactions for past, present and future generations.”

The island’s forests are a lifeline for its wildlife, too. Kraus says wholesale forest
conversion would “consign scores of species to extinction.”

He said he’s especially worried by the potential for widespread clearance within
Carter Holdings’ agricultural leases, since these contain the remaining portion of
the island’s forests.

“Of the 25% of the island not in lease, virtually all of that would be unforested
too because the local inhabitants would still have to make their subsistence
gardens, and the disturbed land around the government station at Guasopa
takes up a large portion of the remaining land,” Kraus said.
Gold mining poses a lesser threat to the island’s wildlife because of its smaller
land footprint. But critics fear its impact on the island’s culture and offshore
marine ecosystems could be disproportionately large.

Historic gold mining on nearby Misima Island proved something of a mixed

blessing for islanders, according to Jordan Haug, a visiting professor of
anthropology at Brigham Young University who recently carried out fieldwork
on Misima.

“While it has increased people’s access to consumer goods, that increase has
not been equal,” Haug told Mongabay via email. “Some Misimans have watched
their neighbors prosper, while they do not. This has caused a lot of social
tensions on the island.”

A beach on Woodlark Island. Image by Simon Piyuwes.

For now, a fog of uncertainty lies over Woodlark, buffeted by a trifecta of

overlapping threats from gold mine expansion, logging, and industrial
agriculture. The future of the island and its human and non-human inhabitants
teeters on a small number of decisions and actors.

The legal battle over returning customary land ownership to Woodlark Islanders
is on its way to the Supreme Court.
The Kulumadau village relocation plan and further gold mine expansion await
the go-ahead from the Mineral Resources Agency.

Kulawood’s forest clearance application lies in the hands of the PNG Forest
Authority.

And as for the possibility that Carter Holdings may revive its 2007 oil palm
aspirations, Luke Petai has a warning.

“The company knows very well of the opposition from educated locals from the
island since 2007,” he said. “If there [are] any plans, it will not go unnoticed.”

Banner image: Gold mining site from Geopacific Resources via Youtube.

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