Articles by Basten Gokkon

JAKARTA — Indonesia has eased off from the full enforcement of a ban on fishing using a controversial type of dragnet known as a seine, following protests by fishermen. Under…

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government says it will revamp the process of carrying out environmental impact assessments, amid increased scrutiny over the legitimacy of many of these analyses in environmental…

JAKARTA — Indonesia has signaled it may finally send a sample of Sumatran rhino semen to a breeding program in Malaysia, amid a growing urgency to keep the species alive.…

Police in Thailand last week detained a key figure in one of the world’s most notorious wildlife trafficking syndicates, accused of smuggling large numbers of rhino horns and elephant tusks…

JAKARTA — Indonesian authorities have retrieved 17 air gun pellets from the body of an orangutan found decapitated and seemingly tortured in Indonesian Borneo earlier this week. The discovery was…

JAKARTA — Conservation authorities in Indonesia are investigating the death of an orangutan whose headless and apparently tortured body was found earlier this week in a river in central Borneo.…

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — The government of Indonesia’s Aceh province will reject applications for new mineral and coal-mining projects in the region for another half year, in a bid to…

PALEMBANG, Indonesia -- Wildlife activists in Indonesia suspect poachers poisoned an elephant found with its tusks hacked off in a protected forest in southern Sumatra. The body of the male…

MEDAN, Indonesia — A court in Indonesia has sentenced three men, including a former soldier, to two years in jail for illegally trading in body parts from a critically endangered…

Vast swaths of the world’s oceans are turning into “dead zones” as global warming and pollution strips them of oxygen, threatening marine life on a massive scale, a new study…

Scientists have described a new species of bird found only on the island of Rote in eastern Indonesia — but already the population of the honey-eating fowl is threatened by habitat…

JAYAPURA, Indonesia — On a sunny afternoon in early August, two tribal chiefs in northern Papua province, at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, met to formalize the system…

GARUT, Indonesia — It was, at first sight, a typical scene for the Ath-Taariq Islamic boarding school in Indonesia’s West Java province: some 50 people, most of them women, gathered…

JAKARTA — Malaysia’s last remaining female Sumatran rhino appears to have overcome the worst of a serious health condition, less than two weeks after it was announced that her condition…

JAKARTA — Indonesia is lobbying the United Nations to allow governments worldwide to pursue money-laundering charges against illegal fishing operators, in a bid to crack down on the practice more…

Iman, the last female Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) in the Malaysian state of Sabah, has fallen seriously ill over the past few days due to bleeding in her uterus, authorities…

The indigenous inhabitants of Indonesia’s Mentawai district, a cluster of islands off the southwestern coast of Sumatra, are a step closer to reclaiming their ancestral rights to their land from…

The critically endangered Sumatran rhino has been on an arc toward extinction for nearly 12,000 years now, according to a new study based on genome sequencing that also found the…

TAMBRAUW, Indonesia — It took more than two hours by boat, through a driving rain, to reach the village of Saubeba from the nearest large town of Sausapor in Indonesia’s…

The Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis) of Sumatra is both the world’s newest known great ape species and its most threatened, after being officially categorized this week as “Critically Endangered,” or…