Palm Oil And Biodiversity News

The backstory behind the world’s smallest elephants has always been something of a mystery. For one thing, scientists aren’t sure exactly when — and how — Bornean pygmy elephants got…

For more than a century, agroforests in the Sumatran port town of Krui used to be a prime example of how interspersing native tree species among crops could give locals…

Oil palm plantation companies are still eating away at the Leuser Ecosystem, one of Indonesia’s last best rainforests, despite a provincial ban on forest clearance to make way for the…

Logged tropical forests have a bit of a bad reputation in the conservation community. They’re often seen as sub-standard habitats for animals, especially when compared with the robust and varied…

Scientists and conservationists have long believed that the rapid loss of Southeast Asia’s old-growth, “primary” rainforests in recent decades would leave one of its most iconic inhabitants, the orangutan, with…

MONROVIA, Liberia - When Liberia signed a series of contracts with international palm oil producers in the years after its protracted civil war, the news was greeted by some as…

SUKAU, Malaysia – At first blush, the muddy waters of the Kinabatangan River in northern Borneo seem to laze through a hodge-podge of sleepy fishing and farming villages. The river…

On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we welcome Mongabay contributing editor Glenn Scherer to the program. Glenn is responsible for Mongabay’s “Almost Famous Animals” series, which just wrapped up…

On the surface, the Republic of Congo appears to be making strides toward both conservation and economic development. But the process of becoming an emerging economy is not without its…

Sometimes for a scientist, the disconnected pieces of years of research come together in a single, “really awesome” point in time. For ecologist Greg Asner, where it happened was about…

Gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans -- our great ape cousins teeter on the precipice of extinction. And it’s not much of a secret that we humans have had a lot to do…

Southeast Asia is a global biodiversity hotspot — but with about four billion people living in the region, the pressures on that biodiversity are severe. Deforestation rates in Southeast Asia…

As palm oil has become one of the most in-demand global commodities over the past several years, oil palm plantations have proliferated quickly throughout the tropics. Oil palm is currently…

Most of the attention paid to oil palm in Southeast Asia centers on big plantations set up by big companies, and it’s almost uniformly bad for the environment. But less…

Mongabay’s India-based staff writer Shreya Dasgupta appears on this episode of the Newscast to discuss key votes held at the seventeenth congress of the parties to the Convention on International…

2015 was supposed to be a big year for the palm oil industry — the year it proposed to reach a “tipping point” and begin predominantly producing and trading palm…

Junk food consumption is on the rise around the world, even though processed foods that are low in essential nutrients and high in salt, refined carbohydrates, and fat aren’t necessarily…

Most oil palm is grown in areas that were once species-rich and carbon-rich tropical forests, thanks to the fact that the crop’s natural range is limited to the humid tropics.…

Agricultural expansion into tropical forests is an important driver of biodiversity loss — which scientists say has already become so severe across 60 percent of the Earth’s land surface that…

It’s well known that when forests are converted to palm oil plantations, biodiversity suffers. But oil palm trees only last for about 25 to 30 years, at which point they…