Expanding primary care and protecting rainforests in Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea’s globally important rainforests are being stripped away by multinational logging companies, and much of its population have little access to primary care services. However, at Wanang (Madang province) an indigenous-led conservation alliance has established a clinic serving previously medically neglected communities across 500 square kilometres of rainforest. As well as improving community health, this is protecting 15,000 hectares of highly biodiverse rainforest, storing 1.5 million tonnes of carbon.  

Background. In 2018, a team from Brighton and Sussex Medical School and New Guinea Binatang Research Centre funded by Sussex Sustainability Research Programme travelled to Wanang forest following a request from clans who had defended their rainforest home from loggers, but lacked access to biomedicine. A clinical and anthropological health needs assessment was conducted and urgent cases treated. 

The findings were then used to secure funds from the UK government Darwin Initiative to train an emergency team in 2019 and build and open a permanent clinic staffed by nurses in 2020. This has strengthened community support for conservation at Wanang, and in addition encouraged neighbouring clans that previously chose to allow logging to join the alliance, expanding the conservation area by 50 percent.

Find out more. On this page you can watch short videos, read about the project rationale and ethical considerations (published in Sustainability Science), learn how to conduct health needs assessments in remote forest communities (British Medical Journal Open), and read the Wanang needs assessment results (also published in British Medical Journal Open). 

Help us scale up. If you might be able to help us support other communities and their forests, we and our indigenous partners would love to speak to you. Please get in touch.