On today's episode of the Mongabay Newscast we’re discussing great ape conservation in Africa and how that goes hand-in-hand with efforts to protect the second-largest rainforest in the world. Listen…
JAKARTA — Newly published research has linked the spread of oil palm and rubber plantations across a watershed area of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island to worsening floods in the region. The…
Reaching down into the Malay Peninsula, Myanmar’s southern Tanintharyi region is home to rainforests that support a unique assemblage of endemic and endangered species, including the endangered Malay tapir (Tapirus…
JAKARTA — A U.N. fund has approved a $103.8 million payment to Indonesia for preventing deforestation-based carbon emissions — its biggest payout yet, and one that critics say can’t be…
For the past four years Marie-Cresence Ngobo has travelled between the scattered villages bordering the giant oil palm plantations run by Socapalm (Société Camerounaise des Palmeraies), which are located in Cameroon’s rural coastal…
Since the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2016, 300 companies at risk for contributing to deforestation have received at least $153.9 billion in financing, according to a new analysis…
JAKARTA — Indigenous rights activists have welcomed the cancellation of an oil palm plantation permit on Indigenous land in Indonesia’s Papua region. They say the case is a prime example…
To some humans, the idea of treating an orangutan as a person is absurd. For Leif Cocks, spending billions of dollars to find life on Mars while living beings are…
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is carrying out an investigation into whether Singapore-based agribusiness giant Olam deforested more than 25,000 hectares (62,000 acres), in contravention of sustainability criteria it had…
JAKARTA — A new study on certified oil palm plantations and their links to past deforestation has sparked a debate over whether they can be considered sustainable if they’re established…
In March 2020, as Bogota’s coronavirus quarantine began, a white smog hung over the city, coming from fires burning in Nukak National Nature Reserve, nearly 400 kilometers, or 250 miles,…
You may have recently come across an article titled “Coconut oil production threatens five times more species than palm oil—new findings” (or maybe you have come across a similar article…
JAKARTA — An Indonesian government scheme to certify sustainable palm oil doesn’t do enough to protect human rights or the environment, and needs to accommodate input from Indigenous and forest…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Paskalina called to me by waving her hand and asked me to come to her house in a whisper. It was my…
One day around 2010, Agustinus Tomba and his neighbors heard the sound of heavy machinery in their ancestral forest, in the Indonesian province of Papua. When they went to see…
The article was co-published with The Gecko Project. A decade ago, the Indonesian government began to heavily promote large-scale plantation developments in Papua province, a region of savannahs and rich…
JAKARTA — Activists have called on the Indonesian authorities to probe the finances of the Korindo Group, a privately owned conglomerate, in the wake of an investigation that exposed a $22…
For conscious consumers, palm oil tends to be the pariah of tropically grown crops. This is due to the well-publicized fact that oil palm plantations are highly destructive to biodiversity,…
On May 15, authorities in the northeastern province of Si Sa Ket in Thailand arrested two Cambodians and six Thai workers for illegally removing a large Siamese rosewood tree from…
JAKARTA — Martamis says he’s worried about how he’ll pay for his daughter’s education once schools reopen. He’s an oil palm farmer from the village of Lubuk Mandarsah in Indonesia’s…
SAHN, Sierra Leone — The day they came, Margaret Fascia was in her forest garden of cocoa trees, pineapple plants, palms, ferns and cassavas. Like most days of the week,…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. This post details the analysis we carried out to estimate the revenues generated by the Korindo Group from harvesting timber as it…
MBONJO, Cameroon — The first time Emmanuel Elong wrote a letter to Vincent Bolloré was in 2013. “The impact of the group that you are controlling on our lives is…
Between 1885 and 1908, Belgium’s King Leopold II exerted control over a vast area of Africa that would later become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His rule was characterized…
It was the middle of the afternoon in one of the world’s largest metropolises when the sky went black. Thousands of miles away, tens of thousands of fires raged, plunging…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Part 1: ‘Maybe they didn’t expect us to find it’ In April 2019, an Indonesian delegate stepped onto the stage at a…
JAKARTA — A court in Indonesia has sentenced two indigenous farmers to eight and 10 months in prison respectively for stealing oil palm fruit from a plantation company that is…
JAKARTA — Palm oil from a company that burned a pristine orangutan habitat in Sumatra has entered the global market due to an oversight, possibly ending up in products made…
In September 2019, the noon sky over a part of Jambi province in Indonesian Sumatra turned crimson. Fires had been raging through Indonesia for the past few months, and certain…
Ten days after showing his first symptoms, Dannes Piaguaje struggled to breathe as he leaned over a traditional steam remedy in his leaf-thatch jungle home in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The…
