The European Union-Funded Forestry-Climate Change Biodiversity (EU-FCCB) Programme for Papua New Guinea (PNG) recently convened the second Programme Steering Committee (PSC). Implemented by three agencies – Expertise France, CIFOR-ICRAF, and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) – the EU FCCB Programme has started to make instrumental progress in supporting the Government of PNG to enhance sustainable development, livelihoods, and resilience-building measures. The PSC Meeting served as a platform to present the progress achieved since the Programme’s launch in October 2023, highlighting the collaborative efforts among key PNG government institutions, the European Union, and other stakeholder’s and updating the groundwork to set the programme up to further deliver results for environmental protection and sustainable livelihoods in PNG. Key progress to date includes: · Establishing strategic partnership frameworks with key government institutions to roll out implementation at national level, focusing on areas such as digitalization, coordination, regulatory frameworks, organizational performance, and forestry and agriculture downstream processing. · Strengthening livelihoods at the household level in the Mangalas Conversation Area by training and employing 22 community members as field officers to offer in-field training on agricultural practices and post-harvest handling techniques. The trained field officers have extended the training to more than, 1700 farmers and mapped over 1700 cash crop gardens for future European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) compliance. · Preparing for the roll-out of the National Forestry Inventory in East and West Sepik through comprehensive training sessions focused on data management and forest monitoring. The EU-FCCB Programme was launched on 31 October 2023 by Prime Minister James Marape and the European Union Ambassador Jacques Fradin. The Programme aims to support a development model (at the national/institutional level and pilot community/conservation area levels) that reconciles climate change, environmental protection and biodiversity with sustainable, inclusive and gender-responsive green growth and jobs. The programme’s key areas of intervention are: Strengthening governance and institutional frameworks, Increasing knowledge, education, capacity-building, research and mobilization, and Enhancing green public and private investments and sustainable livelihoods. It is implemented jointly by Expertise France (national component), CIFOR-ICRAF (Mangalas Conversation Area/Oro Province component) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (expansion of the National Forestry Inventory in East and West Sepik Provinces). It is one of the EU’s largest environmental programmes in the Pacific Islands region and one of the most ambitious forest-related programmes anywhere in the world.