On June 30, 266 clan leaders across 41 villages in Papua New Guinea’s Torricelli Mountains signed a legally binding “conservation deed” that protects rainforest and its inhabitants and is the result of decades of work by the Tenkile Conservation Alliance.The deed shields the range’s exceptional biodiversity, including the critically endangered tenkile and weimang tree kangaroos, after a long-stalled effort to secure formal government protected-area status has left communities exposed to logging pressure.Conservation deeds have held up in court, with a 2025 National Court ruling citing one to restrict logging on clan lands in East New Britain.Built over two years through a free, prior and informed consent process, the Torricelli deed bans commercial logging and mining, as well as the hunting of threatened species, renews every five years and gives the alliance a model it now plans to extend to nearby areas under similar threat.
It happened with a few strokes of a pen on a hilltop in northwestern Papua New Guinea on June 30: The leaders of the Tenkile Conservation Alliance (TCA) finalized an agreement to protect the densely canopied forests of the Torricelli Mountains that ripple outward in every direction.
