On June 30, 2026 C.E., 266 clan leaders across Papua New Guinea’s Torricelli Mountains completed the final signatures on a conservation deed protecting more than 125,000 hectares — roughly 309,000 acres — of dense montane rainforest. The agreement is legally binding, community-owned, and decades in the making. It bans commercial logging, mining, and large-scale agriculture outright, and prohibits hunting of all three species of tree kangaroo that call these forests home.
At a glance
- Conservation deed: The Tenkile Conservation Alliance and 266 clan leaders from 41 villages formalized a legally binding agreement covering more than 125,000 hectares of the Torricelli Mountain range — one of the most biodiverse patches of forest in the world.
- Tree kangaroo recovery: Tenkile numbers have surged at least threefold this century, with both the tenkile and weimang expanding into parts of the Torricellis where they had not been seen in decades.
- Community ownership: Each village has its own conservation area management committee — required to include at least 30% women — and the deed’s rules were shaped through two years of community consultations before any leader put pen to paper.
A forest that holds 4% of the world’s biodiversity
The Torricelli Mountains in northwestern Papua New Guinea are extraordinary by almost any measure. Scientists estimate the range may harbor around 4% of the world’s biodiversity within a relatively small patch of intact montane forest.
That includes three species of tree kangaroo: the tenkile (Dendrolagus scottae), the weimang (D. pulcherrimus), and the grizzled tree kangaroo (D. inustus). The tenkile and weimang are both critically endangered. When mammalogist Tim Flannery and his colleagues first described them for Western science in the 1990s C.E., Flannery worried the animals’ numbers were so low they might vanish before their existence was widely known.
That fear has not come to pass — largely because of what the Tenkile Conservation Alliance and local communities built together over the following three decades. This deed is the most formal expression of that work yet.
How conservation deeds work in Papua New Guinea
A conservation deed is not a government-designated protected area. It is a contractual agreement — one that draws its legal force from Papua New Guinea’s unusual land ownership structure. Around 97% of PNG’s land is customarily held by clans, a right recognized in the country’s constitution. That structure allows conservation deeds to operate through underlying contract law, according to Peter Dam, technical advisor with the PNG-based NGO FORCERT.
Their legal weight has been tested. In 2022 C.E., the Tavolo Community Conservation Association of East New Britain province — working with FORCERT — took loggers to PNG’s National Court, arguing timber was being harvested from their forests without consent. Three years later, a judge cited the community’s conservation deed in a decision that restricted logging on clan-held lands covered by the deed and extended a buffer zone of 1,640 feet beyond its boundaries. For the Tenkile Conservation Alliance, that ruling confirmed they were on the right track.
The Torricelli deed covers a governing structure in which each of the 41 villages has a conservation area management committee. It outright bans commercial logging, mining, and large-scale agriculture. And it prohibits hunting of all three tree kangaroo species. The deed renews on a five-year cycle — giving communities a structured chance to refine its terms based on what they learn.
“It stands and falls on community leadership and community ownership,” said Grace Dom, a lawyer and legal and policy advisor with WCS Papua New Guinea.
Decades of community work behind a single signing
Jim and Jean Thomas, Australian zookeepers who moved to the Torricellis in 2003 C.E. and now serve as TCA’s CEO and chief operating officer respectively, began by working with communities to end tree kangaroo hunting. The results were striking: tenkile numbers have at least tripled this century, and both the tenkile and weimang have expanded into parts of the range where they had not been recorded in decades.
TCA also invested in the communities themselves — bringing water tanks, metal roofs, and solar-powered lighting to remote villages, and developing ranger programs for both men and women.
The conservation deed itself took two years of consultations to draft. Those discussions covered threats, land mapping, governing structures, and existing traditional conservation practices. The process followed the principle of free, prior, and informed consent throughout.
“There’s often a lot of traditional laws already either in place or people still know them,” Dam said. “They may not be followed anymore, but they’re sort of revived through this process.”
For TCA project manager Caleb Bulu, who has spent years fighting to keep loggers off his own land in the region, the signing was a long time coming. “We have been waiting for so long,” he said. After the final signatures were collected in the village of Lumi, those gathered celebrated with dance and song.
Why the deed matters — and what still lies ahead
TCA pursued the conservation deed after years of stalled efforts to secure a government-designated conservation area. The official process — involving mapping, reporting, and government consultations — repeatedly stalled as political support faltered. Logging pressures continued throughout, degrading clan-held lands and fueling internal conflict.
The government agency tasked with processing protected area proposals, the Conservation and Environment Protection Authority (CEPA), has faced persistent criticism for lacking capacity, staffing, and funding. It did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment on this story.
Jim Thomas is direct about where the obstruction often originates. “It goes through the political networks, and then the people on the ground are the last to find out,” he told Mongabay, noting that logging interests hold significant political influence in PNG — though such connections are difficult to prove definitively.
TCA has not abandoned the goal of an official protected area. The deed is designed to serve as a complement, not a replacement: the maps, community consultations, and governance structures already in place can feed directly into a future gazettal process. “We’d still like to obtain both,” Thomas said.
The alliance is also looking beyond the Torricellis. Thomas said TCA plans to approach around two dozen villages in the neighboring Bewani Mountains, where primary forests are currently under heavy logging pressure. This story is one chapter in a much larger set of Indigenous land protection efforts unfolding across the Pacific and beyond.
Flannery, who first described the tenkile and weimang more than three decades ago, called the deed’s signing “a huge step forward for the people of the Torricellis.” He expressed hope it would end logging encroachment and hand more control to local communities over land management.
The Torricelli communities, for their part, are watching what comes next with clear eyes. “They will put it into trial and see if it works,” Bulu said. “We will be coming back after five years to evaluate what we are doing.”
Read more
For more on this story, see: Mongabay — New conservation deed aims to protect tree kangaroos, forests, people in Papua New Guinea
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights at COP30: 160 million hectares protected
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- The Good News for Humankind archive on Papua New Guinea
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