Papua New Guinea's Office of Climate Change and Carbon Trading is to co-ordinate an international scoping mission aiming to assess the extent of illegal logging in the country.
The executive director of the newly-established office, Theo Yasause, says urgent action against rampant deforestation needs to be a central feature of future international frameworks on climate change.
He says illegal and destructive logging is helping fuel global warming and says carbon financing can help ease the problem.
But while the World Bank estimates that up to 70 percent of logging in PNG is illegal, Dr Yasause says it may not be that rife.
However he says the government has introduced stringent monitoring of the logging industry and will assess its extent.
"Next week we're having a scoping mission with the World Bank, UN, AusAID and others, other development partners, undertake a massive consultation process. So I'm co-ordinatnig that from next week onwards. So by the end of the week, we will have scoped, to really review the whole process."
