Articles by Hans Nicholas Jong

SINGAPORE — One of the world’s biggest palm oil companies is testing new GPS-based technology to trace the provenance of palm fruit all the way back to the plantation where…

JAKARTA — Frans remembers getting up just after sunrise on a September day last year in his village of Panca Mukti, in the Indonesian province of Central Sulawesi. He’d been…

JAKARTA —Demand for energy in China and Indonesia continues to drive the resurgence of the latter’s coal industry, setting back efforts in both countries to shift to a greater share…

JAKARTA — Recent findings of deforestation by two companies with ties to the Sinar Mas Group and its pulp and paper arm, Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), have led Greenpeace…

JAKARTA — A landmark Indonesian case that saw an oil palm company fined millions of dollars for burning carbon-rich peatlands has effectively been derailed by a district court on the…

KIRAM, Indonesia — The well-being of tens of thousands of athletes and spectators at Asia’s biggest sporting event later this year will depend on an unusual pair: palm oil and…

JAKARTA — Officials in the Indonesian province of Aceh have vowed to safeguard the last known habitat shared by tigers, orangutans, rhinos and elephants, but concerns abound that the proposed…

JAKARTA — Activists in Indonesia have called on the Chinese government to withdraw funding for a hydroelectric dam that threatens to fragment the only known habitat of the most endangered…

KIRAM, Indonesia — It was one of the most spectacular failures of modern agriculture, but two decades after it was abandoned, patches of Indonesia’s Mega Rice Project look to be…

JAKARTA — Environmental experts and activists are closely watching a lawsuit filed against an academic whose testimony helped convict a governor on corruption charges, in a case many fear could…

JAKARTA — It took Yando Zakaria, an Indonesian anthropologist, four hours to convince the embattled Suku Anak Dalam tribe to get involved in his study last year on the cost…

JAKARTA — Oil palm farmers in Indonesia are mounting a legal challenge to get a bigger share of a government fund they complain is being misused to subsidize biofuel producers.…

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government looks poised to derail a long-awaited bill on the rights of the country’s indigenous groups, calling it “not a necessity” and saying it will only…

JAKARTA — An effort by the Indonesian government to compile a single map of land-use cover across the vast archipelago is nearing completion seven years after it began, but continues…

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government is preparing to punish state-owned oil and gas firm PT Pertamina over a major oil spill stemming from one of its undersea pipelines in eastern…

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government aims to impose its homegrown sustainability standard for palm oil on all operators, but concerns persist over the readiness of the previously exempt small-scale farmers…

JAKARTA — A highly contentious set of revisions to Indonesia’s Criminal Code threatens to undermine the fight against environmental offenders and polluters, activists warn. Deliberations on the new draft are…

JAKARTA — A program under which pulpwood and logging companies in Indonesia must preserve and restore any peat habitats that fall within their concessions could lead to greater deforestation, NGOs…

JAKARTA — A South Korean-owned company previously under fire for clearing vast swaths of pristine forest in Indonesia’s easternmost Papua province has continued to deforest its oil palm concession in…

JAKARTA — The rate of deforestation in selective-logging concessions in parts of Indonesia has unexpectedly overtaken those of pulpwood and oil palm concessions, a new study shows. A study by…