A Malaysian company that helped found the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil is suing the RSPO for suspending its sustainability certification over alleged environmental transgressions in Indonesia. IOI Group has filed…
Environmental groups have raised concerns that Indonesian president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s planned moratorium on new oil palm and mining concessions will have limited impact without hawkish enforcement by local governments…
Struck early this year by the annual haze scourge, Malaysia has proposed to amend the Environmental Protection Act so that the state can seize badly burning land, often set alight by…
A major heatwave caused by the ongoing El Niño weather phenomenon continued across Malaysia this week after fires and haze pollution damaged air quality and sent temperatures soaring as high…
Asia Pulp & Paper’s (APP) plans to operate a giant mill in South Sumatra later this year have raised some uncomfortable questions about the veracity of the conglomerate’s lauded no-deforestation…
Reactions to Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s recently announced plan to ban new oil palm and mining permits were generally positive on Friday, with activists reminding him that the devil is…
Smog from forest fires and hotspots continued to threaten air quality in parts of Indonesia's Sumatra on Friday as local authorities waited for the mid-April rainy season to arrive. The…
n the summer of 2013, as Indonesian fires enveloped the region in a toxic haze, public ire settled on plantation firms as prime culprits in the disaster. Burning land to…
The number of hotspots across Indonesia's forests and peatlands increased to 76 across Kalimantan and Sumatra on Monday as authorities prepared for elevated risks of widespread fires in the coming…
Want to make a million dollars? Find the most efficient way to map Indonesia’s peatlands. That’s the ticket to winning the Indonesian Peat Prize, announced by the cartographically challenged Southeast…
Nothing about the 292,000 hectares of acacia plantations established on the Kampar Peninsula – one of Southeast Asia's largest peat domes – can be considered sustainable, says a recent report commissioned…
Part five in a five-part series on the attitudes of palm oil financiers towards company sustainability. Read the first, second, third and fourth installments. anks and investors are increasingly looking for ways to hold companies accountable for their…
The government of Norway announced on Wednesday it would continue its environmental funding partnership with Indonesia, offering $50 million to support the archipelago’s newly created Peat Restoration Agency. “This is…
Peat fires burned 293,065 hectares of land within concessions managed by Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) suppliers during last year's haze crisis, an area amounting to 37 percent of its…
by 4 February 2016
Last year some two million hectares of land in Indonesia went up in flames across Sumatra, Borneo, and the Western half of New Guinea. The conflagrations caused choking air pollution,…
Part three in a five-part series on the attitudes of palm oil financiers towards company sustainability. Read the first, second, fourth and fifth installments. he question of materiality — whether an issue affects a company’s finances…
Indonesian President Joko Widodo has appointed conservationist Nazir Foead to head up a newly-created peatland restoration agency, which aims to resurrect peatlands devastated by recent fires. The establishment of the…
The world's largest pulp and paper supplier, Asia Pulp & Paper (APP), will establish an up to $10 million program to support the economic development of 500 villages in and…
One legal letdown was enough for Siti Nurbaya. The Indonesian environment minister plans to be directly involved in appealing the court decision in favor PT Bumi Mekar Hijau, a plantation firm accused of…
Round two, industry. Four months after Indonesia’s Supreme Court ordered an oil palm grower to pay a record $26 million for cut-and-burning forest in Aceh, a different firm has been…
Between Indonesia's massive forest fires, the official approval of REDD+ at climate talks in Paris, and the establishment of several major national parks, there was plenty to get excited about…
More than 50 plantation companies are being punished or investigated by the Indonesian for fires linked to the choking haze that polluted skies across Southeast Asia this fall. A week…
This year’s El Niño weather event has intensified dry conditions in both Indonesia and Brazil, providing ideal conditions in the normally wet tropics for fires to burn unchecked.
Indonesia is under pressure to properly enforce sweeping land-management reforms to improve its record on devastating wildfires with less than a week to crucial climate talks in Paris. “As a global…
The government of Riau province will drop its official state of emergency at the end of the month in the latest evidence that local governments are winding down their anti-haze…
The Indonesian government has yet to provide compensation to low-income families affected by smoke pollution from the archipelago’s wildfire disaster because of bureaucratic delays, a government minister said over the…
The Indonesian military said on Thursday conditions in South Sumatra had improved but that it was not yet time to withdraw soldiers seconded to firefighting efforts in more remote parts…
or several months until very recently, a gray pall of haze hung over Singapore, a result of uncontrolled wildfires and peatland hotspots in neighboring Indonesia. And as Anuj Jain from…
Indonesian vice president Jusuf Kalla again blamed the wind for the regional haze crisis during an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit on Tuesday in the Philippines. Kalla’s comments come months after…
Pedestrians and bicyclists in Asian metropolises like Beijing, Delhi or Jakarta often wear face masks as shields against the smog and polluted haze engulfing them. But they risk more than…