Capturing Sumatran rhinos was one thing. Keeping them alive turned out to be another thing entirely.
This is the first article in our four-part series “The Rhino Debacle." It’s hardly the most likely place to meet a Sumatran rhino. But as you enter Zimmer Hall at…
Oil palm plantations are the biggest source of agriculture-related deforestation in Southeast Asia. Researchers estimate that at least 95,000 square kilometers of land have been converted to oil palm plantations…
JOHOR BAHRU, Malaysia – On Jan. 1, 2014, fishermen near Kampong Pok, a village on Malaysia’s southern shore, were alarmed to find a fleet of barges and dredgers dumping sand…
KUANTAN, Malaysia — Beijing is more than 4,200 kilometers (2,600 miles) north of the sandy beaches, oil palm plantations and tropical forests that distinguish peninsula Malaysia’s less prosperous South China…
KUALA LUMPUR — Before the May 9 election that swept Najib Razak and his Barisan Nasional coalition from power, the then prime minister of Malaysia presided over one of the…
KUCHING, Malaysia — For more than a decade, June Mary Rubis has worked on orangutan conservation in Borneo. The critically endangered apes face a bleak future there, hammered by habitat…
A top official is out of his post as head of Sabah's forestry department, which oversees forests in the Malaysian state on the island of Borneo. According to press reports,…
KUALA LUMPUR — By 2012, when then-prime minister Najib Razak formally launched the River of Life project to improve water quality and restore the aesthetic virtue of the Klang River,…
GEORGE TOWN, Malaysia — Muddy carpets and soaked furniture lay in moldering piles on the streets of this state capital. It was Sunday morning, Oct. 29, 2017. Eight days earlier,…
Spring Energy is the just the sort of homegrown, super successful, keenly entrepreneurial company that developing nations across the world crave. Based in a tidy three-story building not far from…
KUCHING, Malaysia — As governments in Southeast Asia target economic growth through infrastructure development, China, the world’s second-largest economy, has emerged as a ready funder for some of the most…
Malaysian authorities have seized wildlife parts worth 500,000 ringgit ($124,000) and arrested six Vietnamese nationals during a raid in Kuala Lipis, a town located near Taman Negara, the country’s oldest national…
KUCHING, Malaysia — Implicit gender and race bias within the conservation community may be undermining researchers’ work in both the field and in science publication, experts say. “One of the…
Increases in greenhouse gas levels are closing plant stomata (tiny pores in leaves); the plants then retain more water, potentially altering tropical rain patterns: study.
Poaching of otters, especially juveniles, for the online pet trade is so widespread in Southeast Asia that it has emerged as a major new threat to the survival of Asia's…
In a forest in Borneo, a single two-horned rhino lives, separated from any other of her kind. Conservationists are currently planning to catch this Sumatran rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) and bring…
Southeast Asia is a global biodiversity hotspot, and Indonesia and Malaysia are no exception, harboring some of the highest levels of species diversity in the world. Yet those two countries…
In October last year, a team of scientists were out on a night hike surveying bats in the forests of the Penang Hill in the Malaysian state of Penang when…
Citizen scientists have named a newly discovered species of water beetle after Leonardo DiCaprio in recognition of the Hollywood actor’s support of environmental causes. Grouvellinus leonardodicaprioi was discovered during an…
LANGKAWI, Malaysia – In Kilim Karst Geoforest Park, part of Langkawi UNESCO Global Geopark, a man in T-shirt and shorts laughs with his friends as one of the long-tailed macaques…
Selective logging has long been considered the lesser evil compared to clear-cutting when it comes to habitat preservation. But a new study adds to a growing chorus of concern that…
Hoping that sperm from one of Indonesia's rhinos can be used to fertilize Malaysia's last remaining female rhino, conservationists have been awaiting permission for the transfer for years.
Rising human populations and widespread industrial agriculture have hemmed one of the least-understood cats on the planet into ever-smaller patches of forest on the island of Borneo, a recent study…
The endangered wild cattle of Malaysian Borneo have eased back on their daytime activities because of higher temperatures brought on by loss of forest cover — a finding that has…
In 1866, the Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari chanced upon a peculiar plant in the rainforests of western Sarawak, in Malaysian Borneo, where he had set up camp. He made detailed sketches of…
Conservation-minded planners often pick places with the fewest signs of human impact for protection, and, across the tropics, pristine rainforests with the tallest trees often rise to the top of…
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,…
Frogs can survive in oil palm plantations, but at the cost of diversity of species — and the impact can radiate out deep into neighboring forest ecosystems, according to a…
Nearly 100,000 small hydropower dams exist or are planned worldwide, and science has done little to study or inform policymakers about cumulative environmental impacts.