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Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program: A Model for
TREE KANGAROO CONSERVATION PROGRAM:
A Model for Conservation Success
On a remote peninsula in Papua New Guinea, some of the most pristine forests on Earth are home to a unique and precious diversity of species. Woodland Park Zoo’s Lisa Dabek arrived here 25 years ago in search of the Matschie’s tree kangaroo, a marsupial never before studied in the wild. What happened next ignited an entire region’s passion for conservation. Today, the communities of YUS (named for the Yopno, Uruwa and Som Rivers that run through the area) are globally recognized conservation innovators. With the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program, more than 14,000 Indigenous landowners and their families have created the first nationally recognized community-managed conservation area in Papua New Guinea’s history. The YUS Conservation Area protects more than 187,000 acres of forest and 50 villages against logging, mining and overhunting—and stretches from mountainous cloud forests to lowland rain forests to coral reefs. From schoolaged junior rangers and coffee entrepreneurs to midwives and hunters-turned-trackers, every person living in this region has contributed to the program, working together to safeguard forest biodiversity in one of the most distinctive places on the planet. Woodland Park Zoo is known for stellar conservation work, and with the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program it has accomplished something truly extraordinary: If conservation is going to make a lasting difference, change must be led from within the communities themselves.
Lisa Dabek, Woodland Park Zoo Senior Conservation Scientist and Founder and Director of the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program
How did a group of isolated communities in Papua New Guinea unite global leaders, save an ecosystem on the brink of irreparable damage, and improve their own health and economic stability? Twenty-five years after Lisa Dabek began her quest, we honor the success of YUS communities and the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program—and ask what they can teach us. At the core of this work is a hard-won trust earned because, from their first meeting, program staff have listened and responded to what the people of Papua New Guinea identify as their greatest needs, and pursued projects that:
• Champion community leadership • Act on Indigenous knowledge and cultural traditions • Prioritize biodiversity • Treat the health and future success of forests, wildlife and humans as interlinked
• Make youth, our future conservation leaders, the stewards of the land today
The YUS Conservation Area has become an international model for how to enact inclusive conservation strategies that ensure people, animals and forests can thrive. By protecting the Matschie’s tree kangaroo, YUS communities motivate people everywhere to act for the health of their own forests and global biodiversity.
Protecting Biodiversity
Biodiversity refers to the variety of all life on Earth—from the single-celled paramecium to the 400,000-pound blue whale. In addition to including every living thing and the ecosystems where they dwell, the word’s broadest definition also encompasses human cultural diversity. Biodiversity brings us clean air and drinking water because thriving forests pump out the oxygen we breathe, and healthy ecosystems serve as filters for the clean water we depend on. Biodiversity is also our best tool against climate change: Intact forests store carbon, generate oxygen and reduce the impact of flooding and pollution. In the YUS forests of Papua New Guinea, humans are only as healthy as the local tree kangaroos, echidnas and hornbills. Similarly, in the Pacific Northwest, our health is intrinsically connected to that of the cedar trees, Douglas squirrels and banana slugs in the woods next door.
Why the Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo?
Fly 6,550 miles from the gates of Woodland Park Zoo, southwest in an arc over the Pacific Ocean, and you’ll arrive on Papua New Guinea’s lush, moss-draped Huon Peninsula. Though just 60 miles south of the equator, the air here feels more Cascade crisp than tropically muggy. On a satellite map, a cloud cap consistently clings to verdant peaks topping 13,000 feet. Matschie’s tree kangaroos live solitary lives here, in the upper reaches of trees like the majestic old-growth Papuacedrus. Listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, tree kangaroos are under constant threat from habitat destruction and unsustainable hunting practices. Only 2,500 mature individuals are believed to survive in the wild. Matschie’s tree kangaroos are an umbrella species, which means that protecting them indirectly safeguards myriad other species that share their habitat. The Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program was created to protect the Matschie’s tree kangaroo and its forest home. And after YUS communities designated a no-hunting zone to boost tree kangaroo populations, countless other animals and plants have also benefited.
Further Action for Biodiversity
In 2020, the people of YUS took another giant step forward to prioritize diversity and prevent climate change. Working with the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program and the government of Papua New Guinea, they deemed the areas where they live and work as a living landscape deserving recognition, respect and safeguarding. They acted on this by expanding the 187,000-acre YUS Conservation Area to include the entirety of their region’s 402,000 acres. This significantly strengthened YUS community efforts to sustainably manage their land for the benefit of humans, wildlife and forests, and emphasized the interdependency of all life. In protecting the biodiversity of their homeland, the residents of YUS are also preserving their cultural heritage and fighting global climate change. “Our coffee gardens serve as a place where animals and birds can feed and make their homes. My coffee garden houses all kinds of bird species, including the bowerbird, which likes the shade and came to build its nest here.”
Herson Hame, YUS coffee farmer
Conservation for Our Children’s Future
By Stanley Gesang, Lead Tracker, Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program I used to hunt and kill tree kangaroos for protein. When I joined the Tree Kangaroo Conservation Program as a tracker, I saw the tree kangaroos as my friends, and I stopped killing and eating them. We learn from the research work carried out here and I take pride in it. Tree kangaroos were nearly extinct when my clan pledged to protect a large portion of our forest for conservation in 2004. Wildlife is more abundant and diverse in our forest now, and this clearly shows the benefits of conservation. In the past, we had to travel for days to hunt, but today we have wildlife we can hunt for protein near our food gardens. I like my job as a tracker for scientists because I have a source of income to help care for my family and provide for my kids to get educated and improve my family’s way of living. The wages help us to look after our family where life is tough. If we were never introduced to conservation, our tree kangaroo population would have died out a long time ago. I am happy that we have accepted conservation so our kids and their kids for generations will still see a tree kangaroo.
