Papua New Guinea’s national tourism authority says it had no role in designing the levy, no visibility into how the money was spent, and no explanation for why nine months of collections have produced zero funded tourism or environmental work.
Eric Mossman Uvovo did not mince words. On 8 June 2026, the chief executive of the Papua New Guinea Tourism Promotion Authority put out a statement accusing the country’s Climate Change and Development Authority of collecting roughly K2.7 million in so-called Green Fees from international travellers since October 2025, and of funding not a single tourism project with the proceeds, according to Islands Business. Uvovo said his own agency, the body legally responsible for promoting and developing PNG’s tourism sector, had no role in designing the fee, no seat in implementing it, and no visibility into where the money went.
The CEO Statement stated in a statement published by PNGTPA that,
“PNGTPA was not consulted on the Green Fee policy and does not support the current mechanism in its present form. While we recognise the importance of environmental conservation, any charge imposed on international visitors must be properly assessed, transparently governed, and developed through meaningful consultation with the tourism industry and relevant stakeholders.
Papua New Guinea is already a relatively high-cost destination. Policies that directly impact visitor travel decisions should support, not hinder, our efforts to grow visitor arrivals, create jobs, and strengthen tourism’s contribution to the national economy.”
That is the kind of admission a tourism regulator does not make lightly. It is a public statement that the government does not fully know what one of its own departments is doing with money taken directly from the pockets of visitors the country is trying to attract. And it lands at a moment when Port Moresby’s hotel sector is mid-renovation, cruise operators are testing new PNG routes, and the industry is being asked to absorb a levy nobody consulted it on.
The Fee Nobody Agreed To
Papua New Guinea charges international visitors a departure levy of roughly K50, marketed as a Green Fee and intended, according to the Climate Change and Development Authority, to fund climate governance, compliance and environmental monitoring work.
The agency’s own materials describe allocating a portion of environmental levy revenue, roughly 20 percent, to what it calls institutional strengthening: building national capacities for climate governance, compliance and environmental monitoring.
The CCDA has framed the levy as part of a broader global trend. It has pointed to similar environmental charges in New Zealand, Palau, Spain and the Philippines as precedent for the model, arguing those countries have successfully used comparable levies to fund conservation, biodiversity and sustainable tourism programmes.
The comparison is where the trouble starts. Those countries built the levy alongside the industry it taxes. PNG did not.
The Papua New Guinea Tourism Promotion Authority said the Climate Change and Development Authority collected about K2.7 million in fees since October 2025, but no tourism projects had received funding. PNGTPA said it had no role in designing or implementing the policy, despite being the statutory body responsible for tourism promotion and development.
That last detail matters more than it might first appear. PNGTPA is not a lobby group or an industry association complaining about red tape. It is the statutory authority Parliament created specifically to manage tourism policy in Papua New Guinea. If that agency says it was cut out of a decision directly affecting the travellers it exists to attract, the complaint is not commercial. It is constitutional, in the small-c sense: a question of whether government agencies are actually coordinating with each other before they reach into a visitor’s wallet.
Papua New Guinea recorded around 100,000 international visitor arrivals by air in 2025, a figure PNGTPA itself reports. Run the arithmetic PNGTPA’s own numbers imply, and the gap in the CCDA’s accounting becomes sharper. A K50 fee applied to 100,000 annual arrivals would, in theory, generate somewhere near K5 million across a full calendar year if every departing visitor paid it.
The Green Fee has been running for roughly nine months, from October 2025 through to the June 2026 statement, a period that would proportionally suggest collections in the range of K3.5 million to K3.75 million under that same rough model. The reported K2.7 million falls short of that estimate.
This is Exepreneur’s own approximation, built from PNGTPA’s published arrival figures and the stated K50 charge, not a reconciled government audit, and it should be read as exactly that. But the fact that a back-of-envelope estimate is the only way to sanity-check the figure at all is itself the story.
The authority said there had been no formal consultation, no tourism impact study, no agreed governance structure and no process for tourism operators to help manage or oversee the money collected. Nobody outside CCDA appears to have the underlying collection data needed to check the number properly. That is not a criticism of the K2.7 million figure. It is a criticism of the fact that a K50 charge on every departing tourist has been running for the better part of a year without a public reconciliation anyone can independently verify.
PNGTPA chief executive Eric Mossman Uvovo said the agency supports environmental protection and sustainable tourism, but argued that the fee, in its current form, could hurt PNG’s competitiveness. That framing is deliberate. Uvovo is not opposing the principle of an environmental levy.
Vanuatu, Fiji and Palau all charge visitors some form of environmental or departure fee, and none of them have seen their arrivals collapse because of it. What Uvovo is opposing is the process, or the absence of one. The Green Fee was promoted as a funding source for climate and environmental work, but PNGTPA said visitor charges must be transparent, properly assessed and linked to clear outcomes if they are to win industry support.
Two Agencies, One Statutory Overlap
To understand why this dispute happened, it helps to understand what each agency is actually for. The Climate Change and Development Authority describes itself as Papua New Guinea’s lead agency for climate action and sustainable development, working, in its own words, to mitigate climate impacts, promote resilience and integrate environmental sustainability into national policy. It is not a tourism body. It has no mandate over hotel investment, airline capacity, visa policy or destination marketing. Its job is climate governance.
PNGTPA, by contrast, is a creature of the Papua New Guinea Tourism Promotion Act 1993, a statutory body wholly funded by government whose stated goal is to market and promote the country to the world as a travel destination. It sits inside the United Nations World Tourism Organization, the Pacific Asia Travel Association and the South Pacific Tourism Organization. Its job is arrivals, not emissions.
Both agencies have a legitimate claim to a piece of the visitor experience. A departing tourist crosses both mandates: they are a traveller PNGTPA wants to attract back, and a carbon footprint CCDA is chartered to account for. In a well-run system, that overlap gets resolved before the fee goes live, through a joint working group, a memorandum of understanding, or at minimum a shared reporting line so each agency knows what the other collected and spent. In Papua New Guinea’s case, according to PNGTPA’s own account, none of that happened before the charge was rolled out in October 2025.
The Timing Problem
Bureaucratic turf disputes happen everywhere. What makes this one worth Exepreneur’s attention is timing. The Green Fee dispute is not landing in a quiet year for PNG tourism. It is landing in the middle of the most active hotel investment cycle Port Moresby has seen since the original PNG LNG construction boom over a decade ago.
IHG announced in February 2026 that its InterContinental brand would open a 179-room property in Port Moresby, timed explicitly around Papua New Guinea’s entry into the National Rugby League competition and the wave of business travel tied to large-scale gas investment.
Coral Sea Hotels, the country’s largest domestic chain, is simultaneously renovating six of its eight Port Moresby properties, a bet that room rates, which briefly touched K1,000 a night during the last LNG construction cycle and again during PNG’s 50th independence celebrations in September 2025, could become a durable feature of the market rather than a one-off spike.
Both bets rest on the same underlying assumption: that PNG is becoming an easier, more predictable place to do business travel, not a harder one. A departure levy collected without consultation, without a published reconciliation, and without a single funded project to point to as evidence it works, cuts directly against that assumption. It tells the exact audience PNG is trying to court, corporate travel managers, conference organisers, cruise line operators, that government coordination on visitor-facing policy cannot be taken for granted.
That risk is compounded by a second live uncertainty hanging over the same investment cycle. The PNG petroleum minister recently predicted a final investment decision on the Papua LNG project by April 2026, but the prime minister has already pushed that deadline out to September of this year, with the latest statement from the petroleum minister saying only that the government continues to work towards a decision this year, according to the Development Policy Centre’s Devpolicy Blog.
The hotel sector’s entire demand thesis, the K1,000-a-night rates, the six-of-eight-property renovation, the InterContinental’s 2028 opening date, is built in part on a second LNG construction wave materialising on schedule. That project has already been delayed for years, with a final investment decision predicted as imminent in 2018, then 2020, then 2022, then 2023, then 2024, then 2025.
If Papua LNG slips again past September, the demand curve hoteliers are building against gets pushed out with it. Layer an unresolved tourism levy dispute on top of an unresolved gas project, and PNG is asking investors to absorb two live uncertainties at once, one regulatory and one macroeconomic, neither of which the government has fully resolved.
What K2.7 Million Actually Buys
It is worth sitting with the raw number for a moment, because K2.7 million sounds larger in isolation than it does against the scale of what PNG tourism is trying to build. It would not fund the InterContinental’s construction, the Coral Sea renovation programme, or a meaningful share of the Rugby League World Cup infrastructure push. Set against national accounts, it is a modest sum.
But that is precisely why the absence of a single funded project is hard to explain away as a timing issue. Small amounts of money are, in principle, easier to deploy quickly than large ones. A K2.7 million pool could plausibly have funded a handful of visible, reportable environmental initiatives in coastal tourism zones, reef monitoring around dive sites in Milne Bay, waste management upgrades at cruise ports like Alotau or Kavieng, or trail maintenance in trekking corridors like the Kokoda Track, all of which double as tourism infrastructure and climate resilience work. Instead, according to PNGTPA, the money has sat inside CCDA with no disclosed governance structure and no public accounting of what it has been used for.
That gap between the fee’s stated purpose and its demonstrated output is the actual accountability story here, more than the size of the number itself. A K50 charge that visibly funds reef protection near a dive resort is a marketing asset. A K50 charge that a country’s own tourism authority cannot explain to travel agents is a liability.
Precedent PNG Chose to Ignore
The CCDA’s own reference points undercut its position rather than support it. New Zealand’s International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy, the Philippines’ various local environmental fees, and Palau’s Pristine Paradise Environmental Fee all share a structural feature PNG’s rollout appears to have skipped: a published accounting of where the money goes, tied to specific, named projects that both government and industry can point to.
Palau’s fee, often cited internationally as a model for small-state environmental levies, requires every visitor to sign a pledge on arrival and directs proceeds toward specifically enumerated marine sanctuary and conservation programmes, publicly reported.
PNG’s Green Fee, on the evidence PNGTPA has put on the public record, has none of that scaffolding yet. No named projects. No published governance charter. No joint reporting mechanism between the collecting agency and the tourism body whose international reputation is most directly affected by how the fee is perceived.
Why a Small Number Carries Outsized Weight
There is a temptation to read K2.7 million as too small a sum to justify an investigation. That temptation should be resisted, and not just because of the accountability gap already described. It should be resisted because of what PNG’s tourism base actually looks like right now.
Papua New Guinea recorded around 100,000 international visitor arrivals by air in 2025, a base that is genuinely small by regional standards, smaller than a single strong month for Fiji. A market that size cannot absorb reputational noise the way a mature destination can.
Fiji, drawing close to a million annual arrivals, can survive a governance dispute over a departure fee without travel agents in Sydney or Auckland rewriting their PNG-adjacent itineraries. PNG, still building its base almost from scratch, does not have that same cushion. Every travel agent conversation, every corporate travel manager’s due diligence call ahead of booking a conference in Port Moresby, is happening against a backdrop where PNG has comparatively little track record to fall back on.
A visible, unresolved dispute between two government agencies over an unexplained K2.7 million is precisely the kind of detail that surfaces in that due diligence conversation.
This is also why the timing intersects so directly with the capital already committed. IHG and Coral Sea Hotels are not deploying capital into a mature, forgiving market. They are deploying it into a market where the entire investment case rests on PNG demonstrating, repeatedly and visibly, that it can run visitor-facing policy competently enough to justify premium room rates and sustained occupancy. A single unresolved governance dispute will not sink that case on its own. A pattern of them would.
There is a version of this story where CCDA publishes a full accounting within weeks, names three or four coastal or trekking-corridor projects the fee will fund, and brings PNGTPA into a joint oversight structure. In that version, the Green Fee becomes a minor early-stage stumble in an otherwise credible new revenue stream, no different from the growing pains New Zealand and Palau worked through when they first introduced comparable levies.
There is another version where the dispute goes unresolved into the 2028 Rugby League World Cup window, by which point PNG will be hosting significantly larger visitor volumes with the same unresolved question mark hanging over how its agencies coordinate. Which version plays out is not yet decided, and that is exactly why Exepreneur is flagging it now rather than after the fact.
The Governance Pattern This Fits
Readers who follow PNG’s institutional landscape closely will recognise the shape of this dispute even if the specific agencies are new to them. It follows a pattern Exepreneur has tracked across multiple sectors: a statutory body with a clear legal mandate finds itself sidelined by a newer, better-funded agency operating in adjacent territory, and the public only learns about the friction when the sidelined body goes public out of frustration.
That pattern carries real financial consequences when it plays out in tourism specifically, because tourism is a confidence business in a way mining or banking is not. A mining investor evaluates fiscal terms, resource geology and offtake contracts over a multi-year investment horizon and can absorb short-term policy noise. A tourism operator, particularly an international hotel chain or cruise line building a marketing calendar eighteen months out, is far more sensitive to the perception that a destination’s government agencies are not coordinated. Perception, in this business, is close to the entire product.
Three Things Worth watching From Here
Three things are worth watching from here, and none of them have been resolved as of this writing.
First, whether CCDA responds publicly with its own accounting of the K2.7 million, project by project, or whether the agency simply lets the dispute fade without a reconciliation. Its silence to date, at least in what has been reported, is itself informative.
Second, whether the two agencies formalise a joint governance structure for the Green Fee going forward, giving PNGTPA the oversight role it says it currently lacks. That would resolve the immediate complaint without requiring PNG to abandon the levy altogether, and it is the outcome most consistent with how comparable Pacific and Southeast Asian environmental fees are structured.
Third, and most consequential for Exepreneur’s readers directly, whether the dispute shows up in bookings data. PNG’s tourism base is small enough, roughly 100,000 annual air arrivals, that even a modest shift in traveller sentiment or travel agent confidence would be statistically visible within a year.
If Coral Sea Hotels and IHG’s demand assumptions hold despite the noise, the Green Fee dispute will likely be remembered as a governance embarrassment that did not move the market. If arrivals growth stalls heading into the 2028 Rugby League window, the industry will have a harder time separating the effect of this specific dispute from the broader uncertainty hanging over Papua LNG’s investment timeline. Untangling those two threads will itself become a story worth revisiting.
The Bigger Question
Papua New Guinea is trying to do something genuinely difficult: build a credible, premium tourism sector inside a country still working out how its own government agencies talk to each other. The Green Fee dispute is small in dollar terms. It is large in what it signals. A K50 charge collected without consultation, without a governance structure, and without a single named project to show for K2.7 million, is not evidence that PNG cannot run an environmental levy. It is evidence that nobody yet checked whether the agency in charge of tourism and the agency in charge of climate policy were talking to each other before the charge went live.
Every hotel chain currently pouring capital into Port Moresby, and every cruise line testing new PNG itineraries, is making a bet that this kind of coordination failure is the exception rather than the rule. Whether PNGTPA and CCDA can resolve this dispute publicly, with a real accounting and a real governance fix, may say more about the country’s tourism trajectory than any single hotel opening or cruise ship arrival ever could.
Editotial Note: Sources: Islands Business (9 June 2026); Papua New Guinea Tourism Promotion Authority; Climate Change and Development Authority; Development Policy Centre, Devpolicy Blog (16 February 2026). The K3.5–3.75 million comparative estimate is Exepreneur’s own calculation based on PNGTPA’s published arrival figures and the stated K50 fee, and has not been verified against an official CCDA reconciliation, which does not appear to exist in public form.
