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…
Ecuador’s oil palm industry has taken what many see as another step forward by committing to a jurisdictional RSPO system as a way to transform the entire sector by making it…
WIMBI, Ecuador — When Yessenia Padilla heard that her community crops were being destroyed, she and about 70 of her neighbors rushed out to intervene. They grabbed large boards, rocks,…
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…
LA CONCORDIA, Ecuador — Jorge Jurado has been farming oil palm on Ecuador’s coast for almost 20 years, and has seen the industry go through many changes. But over the…
Scientists seeking the tools necessary to tackle climate change need to better understand both the current interplay between carbon and tropical forests and how those forests will respond as temperatures…
KUCHING, Malaysia — For generations, the people of Papua New Guinea’s northeasternmostprovince, New Ireland, have depended on the region’s rich marine resources for their livelihoods. Like the rest of the…
New research comparing the carbon costs of oil palm plantations with those of rubber production finds that while oil palm cultivation is the more efficient process in terms of land…
OSLO, Norway — Banning palm oil in favor of other vegetable oils deemed less destructive to the environment could lead to greater biodiversity losses, a new report says. The report by…
JAKARTA — Food and beverage giant PepsiCo has launched an investigation into reports of deforestation carried out by one of its suppliers in a key Indonesian habitat that’s home to…
LA CEIBA, Honduras — In the small, sky-blue studio at the Faluma Bimetu community radio station, 32-year-old Cesar Benedict reaches for the controls and slowly fades out the fast percussive…
The large-scale expansion of oil palm has been a major driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss in many areas of the tropics. In Malaysia and Indonesia, where 85 percent of…
On May 17, 2018, the first eight orange-furred students arrived to begin their studies at a new orangutan forest school in the province of East Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo. Under…
According to a study published in the journal PloS One late last year, the Brazilian Amazon has about 2.3 million square kilometers (nearly 900,000 square miles) of land suitable for…
JAKARTA — The European Parliament and European Union member states have agreed to phase out palm oil from motor fuels by 2030, easing back from an initial deadline of 2021. The…
SINGAPORE — One of the world’s biggest palm oil companies is testing new GPS-based technology to trace the provenance of palm fruit all the way back to the plantation where…
JAKARTA — Frans remembers getting up just after sunrise on a September day last year in his village of Panca Mukti, in the Indonesian province of Central Sulawesi. He’d been…
LOKOLAMA, Democratic Republic of Congo -- Sometime in March, I found myself trudging forward in a remote swamp in the heart of the Congo rainforest. As I worriedly tried to…
PUERTO CONCORDIA, Colombia — Councilman Ricardo Vargas* sits at the bus depot in the riverside hamlet of Puerto Concordia where narco-inspired corridos play on the radio and a sea of oil palm expands…
Most oil palm production in Pará state has so far been on degraded lands, but researchers warn a coming Brazilian oil palm boom could result in large-scale Amazon deforestation.
Even as scientists introduced the world to a new species of orangutan in 2017 — one of only seven non-human great apes alive today — they were already working to…
Even as scientists introduced the world to a new species of orangutan in 2017 — one of only seven non-human great apes alive today — they were already working to…
Greenpeace has released video evidence that a palm oil supplier for several major food companies has destroyed rainforest in Indonesia. Mars, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever have all purchased palm oil…
Leveraging the most comprehensive dataset ever compiled for the gorillas and chimpanzees that live in western Central Africa, scientists have concluded that there are more of the two subspecies than…
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…
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…
JAKARTA — Oil palm farmers in Indonesia are mounting a legal challenge to get a bigger share of a government fund they complain is being misused to subsidize biofuel producers.…
JAKARTA — An effort by the Indonesian government to compile a single map of land-use cover across the vast archipelago is nearing completion seven years after it began, but continues…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government aims to impose its homegrown sustainability standard for palm oil on all operators, but concerns persist over the readiness of the previously exempt small-scale farmers…
JAKARTA — A South Korean-owned company previously under fire for clearing vast swaths of pristine forest in Indonesia’s easternmost Papua province has continued to deforest its oil palm concession in…
