BOSAVI

PROJECT

The BOSAVI Landscape

Bosavi lies within one of the largest remaining roadless expanses of primary tropical rainforest in the Asia Pacific. The Kasua's 300,000 hectares of customary land encompass ecosystems ranging from lowland rainforest to montane cloud forest surrounding Mount Bosavi.

In 2009, a six-week biological expedition documented over 40 species new to science and hundreds more are thought to be undocumented.

In 1996, the Kasua people rejected industrial logging on their ancestral land, preserving their rainforest for thirty years at significant cost to their own livelihoods.

Sunrise over a dense, foggy tropical rainforest with rolling hills and a colorful sky.

The Cost of Conservation

For thirty years, the world has benefited from that decision. The Kasua have received nothing in return. Their villages remain without basic health care or reliable education. An entire generation has grown up with few opportunities beyond subsistence farming.

International conservation NGOs have raised billions, donor governments have pledged support for Indigenous forest protection, and successive UN climate conferences have promised to deliver finance to the communities protecting the world's tropical forests. Yet in Bosavi, where the Kasua have already achieved what these institutions claim to value, those promises have brought nothing.

Three smiling children sitting around a small outdoor fire in a lush, green jungle setting.

The Stewardship Response

The Kasua Bosavi Indigenous Stewardship Fund addresses a fundamental weakness in conservation finance. Existing mechanisms largely reward measurable threats to forests or their restoration, while intact Indigenous forests and their customary owners remain excluded from meaningful financial support.

The fund proposes long-term investment governed by the Kasua themselves, allowing communities to improve their livelihoods while maintaining control over the future of their ancestral forest.

A group of people crossing a narrow, makeshift wooden bridge over a deep, green gorge in a dense jungle.

RETHINKING CONSERVATION FINANCE

Our concept note outlines the proposed fund, its governance, and a financing approach that recognizes the ecological value of intact Indigenous forests.

We are seeking partners prepared to confront the failures of conservation finance and help build a model that ends the extraction of ecological value from Indigenous lands without corresponding benefits to the people who protect them.