New Guinea News

JAYAPURA, Indonesia — When Amos Ondikeleuw became a clan leader, he vowed to never give up his community’s land at the foot of the Cyclops Mountains to the migrants flooding…

A month after the world’s largest sustainable palm oil association took action against one of its most prominent members, Goodhope Asia Holdings, over failures to comply with its standards on…

Goodhope Asia Holdings has issued a new sustainability policy, committing the palm oil giant to stop clearing forests and peatlands. The Singapore-based firm was already a member of the Roundtable…

The world’s biggest sustainable palm oil association has frozen the operations of one of its most prominent members on concessions in Indonesia because of failures to meet its standards on…

ASOLOKOBAL, Indonesia — Laurensius Lani’s footsteps can be heard at dawn alongside the traditional honay thatched-roof houses of the Baliem Valley, here in the archipelago country’s eastermost Papua province. This…

The world’s flagship certification body for the palm oil sector is undermining its own standards for plantation developments, according to a group of leading environmental and indigenous rights NGOs, who…

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,…