Foreign and domestic companies are making a push – at times using allegedly unethical means – for the timber found on the island of Nende in the Santa Cruz chain of the Solomon Islands.

The island’s old-growth forests are home to animals like the Santa Cruz shrikebill, which is found nowhere else on Earth.

Concerns have been voiced that logging could wreak havoc on the ecosystem, from the watersheds in the mountains down to the coral reefs ringing the island, if large-scale logging is allowed to proceed.

This is the first in a two-part series on logging in the Solomon Islands. Read the second part for more discussion on the topic.

The Solomon Islands is a country that’s no stranger to sudden and often violent changes. Arcing southeast of Papua New Guinea and northeast of Australia on the edge of the Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire, earthquakes are common, and periodic volcanic eruptions are important reminders of the forces that created this archipelago.

But increasingly, it’s been us humans who have threatened these striking and often delicate island ecosystems with swift changes, particularly in recent decades. And in few places is that clearer than the small island group in the country’s southeast called the Santa Cruz Islands.

The islands’ stands of old-growth forests and valuable tree species have attracted the interest of several logging companies of late. Several years ago, logging began on Vanikoro (sometimes spelled “Vanikolo”), a sparsely populated island about 198 square kilometers (76.5 square miles) in size.

In 2016, a group of timber outfits began a push to get at the timber on the group’s largest island, Nende (often spelled “Nendo” or “Ndeni” on maps, and sometimes called “Santa Cruz Island”). But conservationists, scientists and many local land owners worry that losing these wooded landscapes is akin to shucking off the anchor of life on the island, leaving the people, other animals and plants there adrift.

These opponents of logging contend that Nende, like Vanikoro and other neighboring islands, is home to unique species found nowhere else – also called “endemic” – that couldn’t survive if the forests are stripped away.

They also argue that the livelihoods of the province’s most populous island would be irreversibly altered after changing little for centuries. Similarly, potential funding alternatives, from honey production to ecotourism to carbon offsets, won’t be possible if logging is allowed to move forward, opponents say.

What’s more, accusations of corruption, conflicts of interest and coercion have trailed efforts by the companies and some government officials to harvest the island’s timber.

Sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for their safety, have claimed that the principles of free, prior and informed consent – aimed at ensuring the rights of local people are respected in land-use decisions – have not been part of the process at all.

For their part, officials in Temotu province, where Nende and Vanikoro are located, counter that they themselves have effectively been cut loose by the national government, with little choice but to monetize the islands’ natural resources to fill the province’s coffers and fund development programs.

In January, The Island Sun, a Solomon Islands-based newspaper, reported that former Provincial Premier Nelson Omar Menale viewed outside investments by loggers as a lifeline for Temotu and its dire financial situation. But sources say that little money trickles down from the national government to develop local economies and staunch the staggering unemployment rates in the provinces.

Biological riches

In 2014, biologist Ray Pierce was asked to survey Vanikoro and Nende, as well as the nearby smoking Tinakula, for several threatened species of bats and birds. Islands are flashpoints for the divergence of species – their unique and isolated environments drive striking adaptations that may eventually lead to new species. These species are sometimes made up of a single, small, endemic population, like the Santa Cruz shrikebill (Clytorhynchus sanctaecrucis), a small insect-eating bird that only flies in the forests of Nende.

“Those old growth forests have really deeply incised gullies and they’re dripping wet, [with] lovely mosses and lichens,” Pierce said in an interview. “That’s the sort of habitat that the shrikebill likes.”

The topography of the 600-square-kilometer (231.7-square-mile) Nende extends from its sea-level beaches up to 549 meters (1,801 feet). But even in these forests, these birds, currently listed as Endangered by the IUCN, are “pretty uncommon,” Pierce said.

“They might actually rate as Critically Endangered rather than just Endangered because the population is so small,” he said. “What was clear to me was that if there is any significant logging of the old growth forests there, then that would really seal the fate of the Santa Cruz shrikebill.”

Pierce and his colleagues from the Solomon Islands-based conservation group OceansWatch also identified IUCN-listed Endangered species of fruit bats on Vanikoro and Nende. Bats such as the Temotu flying fox (Pteropus nitendiensis), known locally as the mako, are important pollinators, and they supplement the local human diet.

Pierce said that, while scientists know “very little” about the movements of these bats between islands, he had little doubt about the potential effects of logging on them.

“I think it’s fair to surmise that they’ll be dependent on relatively few fruiting species up in those forests,” he said, “so any interference through extensive logging would be really dangerous.”

The price of extraction

The repercussions of logging wouldn’t just be limited to a handful of obscure species, Pierce said. They would extend “from the mountaintop through the streams, right down to the reef and probably over the reef as well,” he said.

“The big impacts, if there was extensive logging and if it were not that sensitive around waterways, would be the loss of good fresh water in the streams,” he added.

Even the coral reefs for which the South Pacific is so famous could suffer, as they have in other parts of the region. The loss of soil-anchoring trees could unleash large amounts of sediment, which research dating back to the 1980s has shown can kill coral tissue.

Pierce noticed this happening when he flew over the island of Guadalcanal, home to the Solomon Islands’ capital city of Honiara. “I could see that logging was having this huge siltation effect on the reef,” he said.

Now the signs of timber extraction are showing up on islands hundreds of kilometers from the capital. Satellite images between 2015 and 2016 reveal the development of what are “almost certainly logging roads,” said Bill Laurance, a tropical ecologist who studies the effects of road and infrastructure development.

“They’re reticular” – that is, the roads fan out to create a network rather than point-to-point access – “to increase access to forest, and don’t really go anywhere aside from spreading out over the forest,” Laurance told Mongabay in an email.

Additionally, they track ridgelines, which he said is “standard practice” in the timber sector. And despite being narrow, they appear to be “main logging roads,” built to stay in place.

The type of industrial logging that it appears crews are preparing for on Vanikoro, and the kind that Pierce and others fear might follow on Nende, would be a seismic shift in how the islands’ timber resources have traditionally been managed.

Local people have typically only cut down trees when they needed wood for a house or a canoe, which has had “minimal impact” on the forest, Pierce said.

From his perspective, that’s where part of the solution lies: “The obvious thing, and what most of the people to me seem to want, is to continue with the status quo,” Pierce said, “which is to continue with a sustainable harvest, which they’ve been doing for hundreds of years.”

But what about the “woefully under-resourced” Temotu provincial government, the leaders of which see logging as a path toward financial stability? Similarly, sizable, one-time payments to landowners for the rights to log their land, even when they don’t capture the full value of the forest or the logs themselves, might be too tempting to pass up in a country where many islands struggle with unemployment rates of 95 percent or higher.

“There’s just no simple solution to that large-scale logging,” Pierce said.

Mongabay contacted two of the companies vying for logging rights on Nende, Malaysia-based Xiang Lin and Solomon Islands-based Tufoal Timber. Neither responded to requests for comment on the record.

The need, as Pierce puts it, is to find “a new way of utilizing the forest rather than just destroying it.” Conservation groups have worked to develop plans leveraging the copious coconut groves on the islands to produce sought-after oil. Many also see ecotourism, still in its infancy in the Solomon Islands, as a source of cash that could eliminate the push for detrimental industrial logging.

The alternative – one that the people of Nende and the Santa Cruz Islands squarely face right now – would likely lead to the disappearance of that resource.

“Commercial harvesting [is] going to be all over very quickly,” Pierce said.

“Who’s going to benefit from it?” he asked. “Certainly not the local communities, and they know that.”

Elliot Dawea is an investigative journalist from the Solomon Islands, currently studying for a bachelor’s degree communication arts, journalism and international relations in Papua New Guinea. He is on Twitter @ElliotDawea. John Cannon is a staff writer at Mongabay and can be reached on Twitter at @johnccannon.

CITATIONS:

BirdLife International. (2016). Clytorhynchus sanctaecrucis . The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T22734762A95096376. http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-3.RLTS.T22734762A95096376.en. Downloaded on 30 April 2017.

. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T22734762A95096376. http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-3.RLTS.T22734762A95096376.en. Downloaded on 30 April 2017. Hodgson, G. (1989). The effects of sedimentation on Indo-Pacific reef corals (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Hawaii, Manoa, Hawaii.

Leary, T., Hamilton, S. & James, R. (2008). Pteropus nitendiensis . The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2008: e.T18744A8535844. http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2008.RLTS.T18744A8535844.en. Downloaded on 30 April 2017.

. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2008: e.T18744A8535844. http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2008.RLTS.T18744A8535844.en. Downloaded on 30 April 2017. Pierce, R. (2014). Surveys of threatened birds and flying-foxes in the Santa Cruz islands, Solomon Islands, September – October 2014. Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund .

Planet Team (2017). Planet Application Program Interface: In Space for Life on Earth. San Francisco, CA. https://api.planet.com.

Editor’s note: William Laurance is a member of Mongabay’s advisory board.

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