JAKARTA — UNESCO has urged the Indonesian government to close a stretch of road that runs through the largest protected area in Southeast Asia, citing its negative environmental impact. In…
JAMBI, Indonesia — Armed with a flashlight, 43-year-old Musadat walks slowly through the thick and dense Harapan forest, one of the last remaining expanses of lowland tropical rainforest on the…
Osvalinda Alves Pereira is the first Brazilian to win the prestigious Edelstam Prize. As a civil rights defender, and at great risk to herself, Osvalinda is resisting criminals illegally harvesting Amazon timber.
JAKARTA — An evolutionary crucible in Indonesia that’s given rise to a unique array of primates found nowhere else on Earth is at risk of disappearing due to rapid deforestation,…
The Cameroon prime minister’s office recently announced it was suspending plans to log Ebo Forest, a large intact forest system in southwestern Cameroon that spans 200,000 hectares (about 500,000 acres),…
JAKARTA — As Indonesia struggles to contain one of the deadliest coronavirus outbreaks in Asia, the country’s president has quietly issued a new regulation on eminent domain. Signed in May,…
KOKOPO, Papua New Guinea — Change. That’s what Monica Yongol has seen in her 54 years. In that time, the loggers and then the oil palm companies have moved into…
Scientists studying the impact of 75 road projects in five countries in the Amazon Basin have found that they could lead to 2.4 million hectares (5.9 million acres) of deforestation. Seventeen percent of these projects were found to violate environmental legislation and the rights of indigenous peoples.
President Jair Bolsonaro has revived a plan, conceived in the 1970s, to extend the BR-163 highway, the main soy corridor in Brazil, north to the border with Suriname. The Trombetas State Forest, one of the four conservation units the road would cut through, stores 2.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide — more than Brazil’s entire emissions in 2018.
Elephant poachers are using logging roads to infiltrate some of the last remaining pristine forests in Central Africa, according to a study published in July. The study’s authors also revealed…
KOTA KINABALU, Malaysia — In July, I traveled most of the length of the proposed Pan Borneo Highway route with the goal of trying to understand the aims, possibilities and…
This is the third article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” Read Part One and Part Two. KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — When Baru Bian was a boy,…
This is the second article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” Read Part One. TELOK SERABANG, Malaysia — At the westernmost tip of Borneo sits a dense…
This is the first article in our six-part series “Traveling the Pan Borneo Highway.” MIRI, Malaysia — Tucked under the sweep of green that blankets parts of Malaysian Borneo is…
The length of roads in Congo Basin logging concessions has doubled since 2003, according to new research, raising concerns about the impacts of these incursions into the world’s second-largest bank…
For nearly 20 years, the Prey Lang forest that spans four Cambodian provinces has been shrinking. What started as a relative trickle in 2000 was on a serious uptick by…
Central Island province in the Solomon Islands has blocked new logging and mining operations in an apparent attempt to halt the degradation of the archipelago’s sensitive ecosystems. “With timber on…
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — Guyana recorded its lowest rate of deforestation last year since 2010, when the South American country established a national Monitoring Reporting and Verification (MRV) program. According to…
Papua New Guinea’s timber industry is plagued by illegality, including lax enforcement of forestry laws, the misuse of logging licenses and the sidelining of local communities, according to a new…
According to a recent report, mining companies currently have claims on 11 percent of all intact rainforests left in the world, meaning 590,000 square kilometers (227,800 square miles) of pristine…
A recent analysis of logging roads in Africa’s Congo Basin has revealed that timber concessions certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) lost more blocks of untouched forests than non-certified…
JAKARTA — An environmental watchdog has accused a palm oil company in Indonesia of failing to extend a sustainable forestry pledge to a timber concession that it also operates. In…
LONG LAMAI, Malaysia — The tallest tajem trees have slash marks clear up to the canopy. Each diagonal cut released some of the tree’s heart-stopping sap to tip someone’s darts,…
When it comes to habitat quality and ecosystem services, research has shown that natural landscapes do it best. A new study, published today in Nature, adds fodder to this argument,…
Roads can be arteries that ferry goods and people, connect communities and markets and bolster economic development. But if they’re not well-planned, they can instigate conflict, saddle countries with debt…
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - It was June 1999, and Cambodia’s then-Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Chhea Song, was addressing a regional symposium on forestry law enforcement in Phnom Penh.…
HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam – After several weeks of silence, the Vietnamese government announced that it is working to begin an investigation into allegations of widespread illegal logging in…
Roads can present big problems for wildlife by severing populations, degrading and fragmenting habitat, opening up wildnerness to poachers, and directly killing animals that stray into the paths of oncoming vehicles.…
