Blackburn doctor settles into new home - the dense forests of Papua New Guinea

Blackburn doctor Reza Hossain is spending this week settling into his new home - the dense forests of Papua New Guinea. Reza flew across the world last Tuesday to join a Greenpeace camp trying to save the world-renowned Paradise Forests, which stretch from South East Asia, across the islands of Indonesia, on to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in the Pacific.

Educated at Feniscowles Primary and Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn, Reza has taken up a position as resident doctor at the Global Forest Rescue Station. As the Paradise Forests are destroyed faster than any other forest on the planet the Greenpeace team, including Reza, is working with local communities to take back land from the loggers.

The Rescue Station is the base camp for marking the boundaries of the Kuni, Begwa and Pari tribal lands around Lake Murray in western Papua New Guinea. The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior is also in the region patrolling the waters on the lookout for illegal and destructive timber being shipped out of the Paradise Forests.

Reza trained as a GP between 2000 and 2004 and usually works as a dermatologist, but now he's ensuring the good health of the Greenpeace team in the heart of an unforgiving forest. Emailing from the Rescue Station, he said:

"It's a bit different from Lancashire, that's for sure. This wonderfully diverse region supports hundreds of indigenous cultures and creatures found nowhere else in the world. It's an honour that the Kuni tribe has invited us here to help. Tragically the loggers are destroying this amazing place to make timber products that often end up in Europe. We're doing what we can to help the tribes claim the land that is rightfully theirs. People back home can help by checking they only buy wood products from sustainable forests."

Reza added that by checking for the Forest Stewardship Council logo (FSC), western consumers can make sure they don't buy products that wreck the world's ancient forests.

More than 1000 languages are spoken on the island of New Guinea alone - around one sixth of all the living languages on Earth today. Greenpeace volunteers from around the world are living and working alongside local landowners and eco-forestry trainers at the Rescue Station, helping the tribes establish their rights over approximately 300,000 hectares of tribal territories by identifying, marking out and mapping their boundaries. This will help them protect the forests from destructive and illegal logging.

In Papua New Guinea, less than one per cent of the forest has any form of protection and more than a quarter of a million hectares of primary forest are destroyed each year.

Reza has been an active Greenpeace supporter for about five years. He says the reason he wanted to work in the Papua New Guinea rainforest in particular was because the rainforests contain the greatest biodiversity on the earth, and contain about two-thirds of all the world's species. "My mum had one instruction for me," he adds. "She told me to make sure I'm not bitten by leeches because she thinks I'm too thin already!"

For more information contact Greenpeace on 0207 865 8255