Kimbe Bay Environmental Challenges – It’s a long journey from Papua New Guinea to the Red Sea, but the way Max Benjamin tells the story, it took a trip to diving’s Mecca for him to fully appreciate what was beneath the surface of his own back yard.
That was 1978 and Sharm El Sheik, at the northern end of the Red Sea, was generally considered to offer some of the very best diving in the world.
But Max and his wife Cecilie were left rather underwhelmed by it all…
Back then they were the new owners of the 800 acre Walindi palm oil plantation on the shores of Kimbe Bay and had learned to dive a few years earlier assuming what they saw underwater in Kimbe Bay was quite normal.
It was only after they experienced what the Red Sea had to offer did they realize just how special Kimbe Bay was!
The rest is, as they say, history and in 1983 they started Walindi Plantation Dive Resort, which has grown to become one of Papua New Guinea’s premier dive locations with its own liveaboards the MV FeBrina and MV Oceania, capable of exploring the most remote locations of New Britain.
Less well known though is what Max and Cecily have done to preserve the unique biodiversity of Kimbe Bay as a result of that epiphany on the shores of the faraway Sinai Peninsula.
Diving Kimbe Bay – Traditional Conservation
Papua New Guinea traditional society is based on a very strong allegiance to clan & tribe and to this day almost 85% of the population lives a village-based subsistence lifestyle.
Very little land in PNG is privately owned and rather than individual ownership, the vast majority falls under the communal ownership of the multitude of tribes that are the fabric of the country. Which means that quite uniquely, the stewardship of the land, and in coastal regions the associated areas of the sea, is a shared responsibility led by the tribal elders.
The land and the sea provide what the villages needs to live and therefore it is in the interests of the clan, and the greater tribe, to manage those resources in what we in the “developed world” would refer to as a sustainable manner.
But to the villagers this is simply common sense, as fouling one’s own nest would surely be a profoundly stupid thing to do – a lesson we in the developed world are slowly but surely coming to terms with!
The PNG stewardship system evolved simply because it had to do and it worked extremely well for a very long time, but in the late 1980’s things began to change as large scale palm oil development and increased population density dialed in new factors in to the complex biodiversity equation that is Kimbe Bay.
Diving Kimbe Bay – The Subtle Impact of Palm Oil
The cultivation of high yielding oil palms in large plantations is a very critical export-focused business endeavor in a province deprived of virtually any other major industry, and its labor-intensive methodology provides a significant number of employment opportunities for the local population.
But, as with all things, there is also a downside and in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia the palm oil industry has received considerable negative press because of the common practices of draining and burning peat land and clearing primary rainforest to establish new plantations.
In New Britain these practices have largely been avoided as the major producer, New Britain Palm Oil, has a very proactive approach to the sustainable development of plantations.
However, the advent of a large palm oil industry impact in the Kimbe Bay area had a much more subtle impact which only became apparent over time, as economic migration into the area, along with high natural rates of population increase, resulted in a steadily rising population density in the urbanized areas
The increasing population placed far greater pressure on the local terrestrial and coastal ecosystems because of the rising demand for food, firewood and building materials plus a significant increase in pollution.
Further compounding the situation, as new people and new ways flooded in to the area, was the move away from the traditional cultural practices which had evolved over the centuries to sustain the subsistence lifestyle of Kimbe Bay.
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