Articles by mongabayauthor

(Baca artikel ini dalam Bahasa Indonesia.) Prologue: Jakarta, 2007 On Nov. 29, 2007, on the tenth floor of a marble-clad office block in Jakarta, the scion of one of Indonesia’s wealthiest families…

(Read the first article in the series, "The palm oil fiefdom.") Indonesia, a nation of thousands of islands draped across the equator, is in the grips of a social and…

A timber plantation company is illegally clearing one of Indonesia’s last coastal peat swamp forests, a carbon reservoir and biodiversity hotspot home to hundreds of endangered orangutans, say observers who…

Greenpeace will appeal a Jakarta court’s ruling against its freedom of information request directed at the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry, setting up an encounter between the NGO and…

MEDAN, Indonesia — Sumatra is haunted by a raft of environmental problems. There are the annual fires that burn across the island’s vast peat swamp zones, which have been widely…

On Jan. 1, 2017, the world’s largest association for ethical palm oil production came to a decision that, if implemented, will allow the Kapa community of West Sumatra, Indonesia, to…

JAKARTA — When he stood for president in 2014, Joko Widodo promised to give communities living in or near Indonesia’s vast “forest zone” greater control over 12.7 million hectares of…

President Donald J. Trump signed two executive orders Tuesday to allow the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline projects to move forward. The pen strokes reversed the course of former…

International and Indonesian NGOs are calling on the country’s largest paper company to stop using drained peat swamps for industrial agriculture. The practice, which relies on drying out the waterlogged…

Samarinda, East Kalimantan, Indonesia - 13 November 2016. We drive to Samarinda, the riverside capital of East Kalimantan Province in Indonesian Borneo, on a cloudy but warm day. Our boat,…

For the first time, Indonesia’s central government has recognized the rights of nine indigenous communities to the forests they call home, a milestone for a national indigenous peoples movement that is…

Major oil palm growers in Indonesia have increasingly found that what’s bad for the environment is bad for business. The financial risk of losing buyers committed to sustainable supply chains…

Fourteen of the 32 Indonesian billionaires identified by Forbes magazine are palm oil tycoons, having accumulated their wealth at least in part through the industry. That includes six of the…

In the wake of last year’s devastating forest fires, Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s administration forbid agribusinesses from replanting the desiccated peatlands that had gone up in flames during the disaster.…