New Guinea News

JAKARTA — The extent of coral reef damage from the grounding of a Bahamian-flagged cruise ship at Raja Ampat earlier this month is about 3.5 times as big as an…

JAKARTA — One of the main coral reefs at Raja Ampat, an Indonesian island chain home to perhaps the world's richest marine biodiversity, was severely damaged last week when a…

Europe’s largest bank has published a new “no deforestation” policy in what environmental campaigners have dubbed a “first step” towards sustainable palm oil finance, which they urge other major creditors…

Indonesian New Guinea holds some of the largest remnants of old-growth tropical forest on the planet. Yet the region faces increasing pressure to share its riches with the rest of…

"Everywhere you look, it's the infrastructure that's very often the first stage in complete profound change," explains William Laurance. Laurance is a Distinguished Research Professor at James Cook University in…

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…

Remote-controlled vehicles will soon begin churning up the ocean floor off the cost of Papua New Guinea, searching for millions of tons of copper and gold. In 2011, Canada-based Nautilus…

Indonesia’s cash-strapped environment ministry is looking into establishing a trust fund to support conservation in the heavily forested Southeast Asian nation, using money from foreign donors. The move would bolster…

housands of sometimes argumentative pages have been written about conservation priorities, advocating that the more threatened or ecologically important a species is, the more it deserves immediate protection and a…

In the fight to protect the extraordinary biodiversity of Papua New Guinea’s rainforests, some conservationists are collecting a unique set of data: the sounds of the forest. Scientists with The…

While fires in Borneo and Sumatra are garnering most of the headlines for the choking air pollution they are causing across Southeast Asia, New Guinea is also experiencing widespread fire…

Global Forest Watch image showing the region in West Papua where the clearing took place Agribusiness giants Cargill and Golden Agri-Resources (GAR) are pledging to investigate a palm oil supplier…

Palm oil fresh fruit bunches in Indonesia. Photo: Rhett A. Butler Last summer, an Indonesian NGO published research showing that an oil palm developer controlled by one of the country's…

Global forest loss drops in 2013, but still tops 18M ha Forest loss in Malaysia and Indonesia, 2001-2013. Click to enlarge. Russia and Canada led the world in forest loss,…

Lowland rainforest in West Papua. An Indonesian police official busted for illegal logging in West Papua has been missing from jail for nearly a year after being granted permission to…

Community leader in Aceh, Indonesia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler. Public hearings into alleged violations of indigenous peoples' land rights will open next week in Palu on the island of…

Palm fruit in Indonesia An Indonesian Stock Exchange-listed company whose commissioner is a member of The Nature Conservancy-Indonesia's board has been clearing dense rainforest in New Guinea, finds a new…

Satellite image of PNG. Courtesy of Google Earth The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), the world's largest group of tropical researchers, is calling on the government of Papua…

Peat swamp in Malaysian Borneo Long considered an unproductive hindrance to growth and development, peat swamp forests in Southeast Asia have been systematically cleared, drained and burned away to make…

Indonesia now has the highest deforestation rate in the world, topping even Brazil which has more than five times the natural forest cover. Background photo: rainforest in Sumatra. Despite a…