Articles by Mongabay.com

An oil palm development bordering Indonesia's Mount Leuser National Park. Photo: Rhett A. Butler A supplier of palm oil giants Wilmar and Musim Mas has continued to bulldoze valuable forest…

A mud volcano responsible for displacing more than 40,000 people in Indonesia's East Java province was caused by an oil and gas company owned by one of the country's richest…

An aerial view of rainforest in Indonesia's Riau province. Photo: Rhett A. Butler Indonesia's Environment and Forestry Ministry might upgrade the partial logging moratorium from a presidential instruction to a…

A coal barge passes the Masjid Islamic Center in Samarinda, East Kalimantan. Photo: David Fogarty A few months before BHP Billiton’s Haju mine is set to begin operations in Indonesia’s…

Rainforest in Indonesia's Riau province. Photo: Rhett A. Butler Weak spatial planning and law enforcement, land tenure problems and a lack of transparency in licensing are some of the issues…

Protesters donned elephant costumes last month for a demonstration outside the Mandarin Oriental's London branch after the launch of the She's Not a Fan campaign targeting the luxury hotel chain's…

A logged-out forest in Indonesia's Central Kalimantan province. Photo: Rhett A. Butler The reputation of oil palm business group Sawit Sumbermas Sarana (SSS), a holding of one of Indonesia's richest…

Peat drainage canal and stacks of MTH harvested from forest clearance by APRIL wood supplier PT. RAPP in Kampar peninsula. Some CITES-protected ramin trees were “saved” and left standing. Photo…

Palm oil fresh fruit bunches in Indonesia. Photo: Rhett A. Butler Last summer, an Indonesian NGO published research showing that an oil palm developer controlled by one of the country's…

Motive not yet clear in nightclub stabbing of Indonesian environmental campaigner Slain activist Jopi Peranginangin posted this photo to his Facebook page in April. (The children are not his.) An…

Rainforest in Peninsular Malaysia. Photos by Rhett Butler. A crackdown on illegal logging in Peninsular Malaysia's largest continuous forest complex has uncovered three timber "mass graves" – burial sites where…

Peatland cleared for palm oil outside Palangkaraya in Indonesia's Central Kalimantan province. Photo: Rhett Butler The charity that Indonesia's Golden Agri-Resources has enlisted to devise and implement its zero-deforestation and…

Forest clearing for oil palm in Sumatra. Photo: Rhett Butler The Mandarin Oriental hotel chain has landed in environmentalists' crosshairs for the practices of its sister company Astra Agro Lestari,…

A bird in North Sumatra's Mount Leuser National Park. Photo: Rhett Butler Market prices can provide an equally reliable indicator of wildlife declines as field data for a thirtieth of…

A Sumatran elephant of the sort that lives in the Leuser Ecosystem. Photo: Rhett A. Butler A new report provides evidence that a supplier of palm oil giants Wilmar and…

Forest cleared for oil palm in West Kalimantan. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has prohibited Golden Agri-Resources (GAR), one of its most prominent…

There's a saying in the Indonesian palm oil industry: Sumatra is yesterday, Kalimantan is today, and Papua is tomorrow. Tomorrow might well have arrived. A new report sheds light on…

A sustainable-business forum in Indonesia's Riau province urged the government to support companies' zero-deforestation commitments, which remain hampered by policies that prevent firms from preserving forests in their concessions. Under…

An oil palm estate in North Sumatra. Photo: Rhett A. Butler Executives from palm oil giants Wilmar, Cargill and Golden Agri-Resources (GAR) appeared at a green investment summit in Jakarta…

A wind farm on the Indonesian island of Sumba. Photo: Antara The Indonesian government plans to expand the list of incentives for "green investment," cabinet members said at a summit…

Small-scale forest clearing in Mount Leuser National Park. Photo: Rhett A. Butler The Indonesian government will take another stab at relocating thousands of squatters from Mount Leuser National Park, most…

Global Forest Watch map showing forest loss between 2001 and 2013 in Peru's Alto Nanay Pintuyacu Chambira conservation area and Alto Purus National Park New NASA data shows a jump…

Cleared peatlands in Indonesia's Riau province. Photo: Rhett A. Butler Indonesia’s forest clearing moratorium is full of holes. At the edge of a jungle in the Sumatran village of Sumber…

Amid EU threats to blacklist Thai seafood if the industry fails to clean up its act by October, the Southeast Asian country and its neighbor Indonesia agreed on Thursday to…

A baby orangutan in North Sumatra. The species is critically endangered. Photo: Rhett A. Butler In Indonesia, preferential targeting of REDD+ projects in high-carbon areas won't do much for biodiversity.…

Water filter chamber at a Palyja treatment plant in Jakarta. Photo: ANTARA/Dhoni Setiawan With the tide of privatized water in Indonesia as close to turning since the dictator Suharto was…

Excavator working in a plantation with rainforest in the background in Sumatra. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. International aid to protect forests in Indonesia and Brazil pales in comparison to…

A newly protected peat swamp in Tripa. Photo: Indonesian Nature Foundation As Indonesia's Supreme Court prepares to rule on an appeal from oil palm developer Kallista Alam, ordered to pay…

Indonesia's biodiversity-focused protected areas are failing to slow deforestation, while other categories have achieved mixed results, according to a new study by National University of Singapore researchers. The study, which…

Landsat image showing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. With scientists rapidly adopting and using a range of remote sensing tools for monitoring environmental change, tracking wildlife and measuring biological processes,…