Haze News

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…

JAKARTA -- The Indonesian government is struggling to collect fines from companies found guilty of damaging the environment, leaving trashed rainforests and peat swamps to stay barren as restoration work…

JAKARTA -- A new palm oil bill is the latest battleground in the fight over how to regulate Indonesia’s plantation sector in the wake of the 2015 fire and haze…

PALANGKARAYA, Indonesia and JAKARTA -- One of the largest drainage canals ever dug through Indonesia’s peat swamps is being blocked in Kalimantan, the archipelago country’s portion of Borneo island, part…

The Norwegian parliament voted today to ban the public procurement and use of palm oil-based biofuel – purportedly becoming the first country to do so. "The [Parliament] calls on the government…

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), one of the world’s most influential sustainable forestry certification bodies, has announced that it will investigate the Indonesian oil palm operations of Korean agribusiness conglomerate…

JAKARTA -- Palm oil and paper lobby groups have asked Indonesia’s highest court to strike down rules holding plantation firms strictly liable for fires that occur on their land. The…

The West Kalimantan governor wants to exempt timber firms in the Indonesian province from a national ban on peatland drainage, drawing the ire of green groups who say such a…

A recent audit of a leading pulp and paper manufacturer in Indonesia has highlighted a significant gap in its sustainability policy, which the company says it is now working to…

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…

Loans and credit from the British bank HSBC have helped support the unsustainable clearing of forests for oil palm plantations in Indonesia, Greenpeace said in a report published Tuesday. The…

A “fire economy” has emerged in Indonesia in which the blazes tearing through the country’s land and forests, driven largely by the global demand for palm oil, are lining the…

Korean company Korindo has said they will stop clearing forest for palm oil concessions until sustainability assessments can be made. The company has promised to conduct an assessment of the…

Massive forest fires in the Congo and Amazon, surging deforestation in Brazil, and tentative steps toward reform in Indonesia and Myanmar: there were no shortage of major happenings in tropical…

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.…

A crucial new government regulation on peatland management in Indonesia is spurring debate over whether the country is going far enough to prevent a repeat of last year’s disastrous forest…

Sixty-nine million people were exposed to toxic haze as a result of last year’s devastating wildfires in Indonesia, a new study has found. Little is known about the health impacts…

The father of a little girl who died during Indonesia’s 2015 fire and haze crisis testified on Thursday as part of a legal challenge to the police’s closing of cases…

PALANGKARAYA, Indonesia — The road from this inland provincial capital in southern Borneo to the delta city of Banjarmasin is littered with degraded forests and peat swamps, hallmarks of a…

Since pledging a year ago to purge its supply chain of deforestation, Astra Agro Lestari, one of Indonesia's largest palm oil companies, has had mixed results, according to a new…

Indonesia’s peat restoration agency is advocating for greater foreign investment to fill an expected funding shortfall in the government's plan to rehabilitate more than 2 million hectares of peat across…

The health ministries of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore have played down a study by Harvard and Columbia universities estimating a mean of more than 100,000 premature deaths resulting from the…

A NASA satellite detected 140 hotspots in West Kalimantan on Monday as smallholders in the province continued to burn land for agriculture, Indonesia’s disaster management agency said on Tuesday. Data…

The Indonesian government is investigating a Korean palm oil giant accused of burning land in the archipelagic country’s easternmost province of Papua. In response to an NGO report alleging that…

Two Indonesian military commanders in Sumatra said this week that they were seeing more fires started at night and on the weekend in order to avoid the military's more frequent…