Biologist at Missoula lecture: native landholders central to conserving Solomon Islands forests amid logging and governance gaps

Dr. Chris Velardi, a biologist at the Center for Biodiversity Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, told a Missoula audience that conservation of biodiversity in the Solomon Islands depends on strengthening native landholders’ capacity to govern and to negotiate with national and international markets.

Velardi said customary land tenure — in which family groups or language groups control land — remains the dominant form of ownership across the archipelago and is central to any conservation strategy. “For native people in the Solomons … who you are and where you live are intimately entangled,” he said.

Why it matters: The Solomon Islands host very high endemism among birds, frogs and other taxa, making their forests globally important for biodiversity. At the same time, Velardi said, urgent local pressures — a roughly 4% population growth rate he cited, rising cash needs for medicine and school fees, and lucrative export markets for raw logs and reef fish — are driving rapid resource extraction that often bypasses landowning communities’ interests.

Key points from the lecture

- Customary land tenure and colonial legacies: Velardi described how a customary land court was created before independence to recognize collective land claims, while later parliamentary regulations enabled individuals to grant timber or mineral rights. He called this a “deep contradiction,” saying regulatory rules allowing individual sales have undercut collective stewardship.

- Logging and local impacts: Velardi said logging intensified after the ethnic conflict and breakdown in governance around the early 2000s, when foreign forces later restored order. He reported that on one island (Isabel) “about 70% of the accessible primary forest on that island has been logged” since the conflict began. He described illegal and poorly managed logging that silted rivers and cut water supplies for schools: “The water supply of the largest national secondary school in the province doesn’t work anymore. They’re importing water for their 800 students because their water supply is all silted up.”

- Community responses and a case study: Velardi highlighted Kolombangara in the New Georgia group as an example where landowning communities helped preserve a continuous strip of coast-to-cloud forest. He credited local leaders such as Joseph Gamu and women’s groups for organizing formal meetings, transcribing genealogies and linking families to the last intact forest corridor. Those measures, he said, helped stop nearby illegal logging after villagers directly interfered with equipment and secured a court injunction.

- Economic alternatives and limits: Velardi discussed alternatives intended to give landholders cash without large-scale logging — small-scale milling and value-added timber, copra and native nut oil production, scientific research visits, and limited ecotourism. He warned that raw-log exports are so lucrative in the short term that these alternatives rarely compete: “There’s no way you can compete with the amount of money you can make short term off of exporting logs.” He also said tourism is fickle and cannot be relied on as a sole strategy.

- Governance, recognition and finance: Velardi said collective registration of land and recognition from government institutions are necessary for customary landholders to enforce protections. He urged larger conservation funders and international partners to “pay the debt” by channeling more long-term capital for reforestation and local governance, describing such funding as an investment rather than a profit-making project.

Quotes

- “For native people in the Solomons … who you are and where you live are intimately entangled,” Dr. Chris Velardi said early in his talk.

- On the incentives that drive logging, Velardi said: “You can make more money off just cutting all the timber down. Make more money now.”

- On community organizing, he described a practical step they took: “We began doing … transcribe this genealogical knowledge into big family trees” and then mapped those genealogies to the remaining forest to support collective claims.

Context and supporting details

Velardi placed the contemporary crisis in a longer history: the Solomons’ complex geology and high biodiversity; missionary and colonial contact; World War II’s demographic shifts and coastal migration; and the nation’s independence in 1978. He said these forces interacted with modern cash demands — for schooling and health care — to produce strong incentives to sell timber rights. He described the regional assistance mission that restored order after the 2000s conflict and said the economic recovery in rural areas has been weak, which in turn increased pressure to extract forest resources.

Actions and outcomes from the lecture

The presentation described local interventions and legal steps (petitions, a court injunction) that villagers used to stop logging in the Kolombangara corridor, and noted ongoing work with Kolombangara Forest Products Limited (KFPL) and the Forest Stewardship Council on “restoration natural forest management.” No formal votes or government actions were taken during this lecture.

Ending

Velardi closed by urging continued support for community-led conservation and for reforms that align national rules with customary tenure. He read Joy Harjo’s poem “Remember” and thanked funders, Solomon Islanders and his family.

(Reporting based on a public lecture presented at the Wilderness Institute in Missoula. The lecture included a question-and-answer session; this article combines Velardi’s prepared remarks with audience questions that clarified points about timber markets, reforestation prospects and customary claims.)