PAPUA KONSERVASI dan KOMUNITAS
Where We Work:
Papua
We focus on ecotourism as the primary driver of conservation and community empowerment in Papua. Ecotourism is uniquely appropriate and well-suited to this role for several reasons:
BIODIVERSITY
Papua is a global biological and evolutionary hotspot. Its location, island geography, rugged landscape, and history of isolation from continental land masses has resulted in unparalleled levels of biodiversity and endemism. Many species of plants and animals, including the legendary Birds of Paradise, are found nowhere else on earth. For many biologists and nature lovers Papua represents the ultimate adventure.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Perhaps counterintuitively, it is actually a relative lack of infrastructure which makes Papua a Mecca for ecotourism. Although under increasing threat from logging, forest conversion, overfishing, and pollution, Papua is still largely an unspoiled paradise, with the vast majority of its forests and coasts relatively pristine.
Arfak Mountains, West Papua
SUSTAINABILITY
Most Papuan communities are poorly serviced, poorly educated, and economically isolated; their most valuable resource is their land and forests, from which they derive their food, water, fuel, building materials, and to which their lives are inextricably linked. But this leaves them susceptible to exploitation from extractive industries such as logging, mining and industrial agriculture, who offer to buy their land for what seems, from the perspective of a Papuan landowner who is isolated from the larger global economy, to be a huge sum of money. But that money is finite and of very limited use in a remote community, and ultimately the landowner is left with nothing.
Ecotourism, on the other hand, provides a sustainable alternative source of income, one which allows Papuan communities to enjoy economic benefits from their land indefinitely and encourages landowners and communities to conserve and nurture their land for the long term. It also opens up related secondary opportunities for employment and income as porters, forest guides, cooks, and hospitality workers.
We focus on remote, isolated coastal and mountain communities that have limited access to established infrastructure but that are located in an area of interest to ecotourists and biological scientists.