The census counted 10.2 million people

Papua New Guinea’s 2024 census counted 10,185,363 people on the night of 16 June 2024². The UN’s figure for 2026 is 10.9 million, the second-largest population in Oceania after Australia, and its medium projection reaches 14.8 million by 2050¹.

That makes the population a lot smaller than some earlier numbers suggested. A figure of 17 million has circulated since an early modelling exercise in 2022 produced it as an upper limit, but it was never a count. A 2023 national projection forecast 21.7 million by 2050, starting from a modelled 11.8 million in 2021¹⁰, and the census later found far fewer people than that starting point. It came in about 4% below even the UN’s estimate for mid-2024¹².

Growing fast, and still very young

Even at 10.2 million, the country is growing quickly. The 2011 census counted 7.3 million, so the population rose about 40% in 13 years, or 2.6% a year². At that pace it would double in about 27 years.

Large families are the reason. The UN puts fertility at about 3 children per woman, and the last national health survey, in 2016–18, found 4.2¹⁵. Half of all Papua New Guineans are younger than about 23¹, which means the generation now starting families is the largest the country has ever had. If fertility is still closer to 4 than to 3, the UN’s 14.8 million is more likely to prove too low than too high.

Most people live far from the capital

Port Moresby, the capital, is home to about 757,000 people, counted as the National Capital District². That is less than a tenth of the country. Morobe, the most populous province, has nearly a million people, and the Highlands region holds 3.6 million, more than a third of the whole population².

With so few people in the capital and so many spread across the mountainous interior, it is not hard to see why counting them is difficult, or why modelled estimates ran so far ahead of the census.

The world’s richest island flora

New Guinea, the island Papua New Guinea shares with Indonesia, has more plant species than any other island on Earth. Scientists have recorded 13,634 vascular plants there, and 68% of them grow nowhere else. Just under 11,000 of those species are found on the Papua New Guinea side³.

Most of that forest is still standing. Papua New Guinea’s Forest Authority measured deforestation at just 0.07% a year in 2016–2019, though that was up from 0.03% a decade earlier⁷. Subsistence farming caused about two-thirds of the 352,804 hectares cleared from 2000 to 2019, and oil palm plantations most of the rest⁷. Satellite data from Global Forest Watch is a little harsher on the oldest forest: about 1 million hectares of humid primary forest lost from 2002 to 2025, roughly 3% of it⁸.

Both figures are low next to the global rate of deforestation. But two-thirds of the clearing so far has been families farming for food, and the number of families is growing by 2.6% a year, which suggests the pressure on the forest is more likely to rise than fall. Offshore, the country’s reefs sit in the Coral Triangle and face the same warming seas as coral reefs worldwide.

840 languages, and land that belongs to clans

The diversity isn’t only biological. About 840 indigenous languages are still spoken in Papua New Guinea⁴, roughly one for every 12,000 people.

About 97% of the land is held under customary tenure, owned by clans and communities rather than by the state⁶. So decisions about clearing forest for oil palm, or protecting it, rest largely with the people who own it.

A country that produces less than its land can renew

Papua New Guinea’s footprint is measured by what it produces, because the open accounts publish no consumption figure for the country. If every country produced at its rate per person, the world would need 1.04 Earths, close to the planet’s limit⁹. Fishing grounds account for 0.33 of that and forest land for 0.32: the fish taken from its waters and the timber cut from its forests⁹.

Unusually, the country’s ecosystems still renew more than it takes from them. Production uses 1.56 global hectares per person, while its land and seas provide 2.80⁹. That surplus is the forest and reef described above. It is also what a growing population and an expanding oil palm industry would draw down first.

Where Papua New Guinea is heading

On the UN’s projection, Papua New Guinea will have about 14.8 million people by 2050, and if fertility stays nearer 4 than 3 it could be more. Unlike most countries, it still has more biocapacity than it uses. Whether that is still true in 2050 depends on how much of the new population’s food comes from clearing forest, and on whether the clans who own the land choose palm oil or standing trees.