Helping the Indonesian government prosecute companies accused of environmental crimes is a risky job. Last year, Bambang Hero Saharjo, the Indonesian environment ministry’s chief expert witness against plantation companies accused…
JAKARTA — Oil palm and logging companies in Indonesia have come into public glare once again as another season of forest fires flares up in Sumatra. Hotspots have been detected…
JAKARTA — Environmental activists have blasted threats by a senior Indonesian minister that the country will withdraw from the Paris climate accord over a European plan to phase out palm…
JAKARTA — It’s responsible for pushing a product found in half of the most common food and consumer items, but the $60 billion palm oil industry has largely evaded the…
JAKARTA — A slowdown in both the expansion of industrial plantations and forest loss across Borneo in 2017 provides strong evidence of a correlation between the two. The findings are…
JAKARTA — Indonesia has restored degraded peatlands the size of a million football fields in the three years since President Joko Widodo launched an ambitious program aimed at preventing a…
JAKARTA — Its name in Indonesian means “hope,” but there seems to be little of that remaining for the Harapan rainforest, a tropical woodland oasis in an ever-expanding desert of…
JAKARTA — A prominent environmental expert in Indonesia faces a lawsuit by a palm oil company after testifying against its practices, in the second case of its kind this year.…
JAKARTA — Organizers of the recently concluded Asian Games in Indonesia had been braced for the worst-case scenario: forest fires flaring up and shrouding Palembang, one of the host cities,…
JAKARTA/PONTIANAK/PEKANBARU — Like their compatriots across Indonesia, a group of residents in the Bornean city of Pontianak celebrated the country’s Independence Day on Aug. 17 with a flag-raising ceremony. But…
JAKARTA — The threat of haze from another season of forest fires on Indonesia’s Sumatra Island hangs over Asia’s biggest sporting event, scheduled to kick off later this month. Authorities…
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…
In the leadup to the release of the second installment of Indonesia for Sale, our series examining the corruption behind Indonesia’s deforestation and land-rights crisis, we are republishing the first article…
Arkani, an elderly Dayak man, drew a telling comparison between the plight of his community and that of the orangutans inhabiting a nearby rainforest, in a part of Borneo that…
JAKARTA – A subsidiary of Indonesia’s second-largest pulp and paper firm is seeking to overturn a government decision to nix the company’s plans to operate on peatlands. PT Riau Andalan…
Susilo sat attached to an oxygen tank instead of tending his vegetables. The 62-year-old farmer, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, had a long history of respiratory trouble,…
Two decades after the catastrophic Indonesian wildfires of 1998-9, writer and artist Khairani Barokka revisits her feelings about the disaster in a book-length poem that highlights environmental degradation and indigenous…
(Baca 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 met with…
(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…
