JAKARTA — 2017 saw Indonesia once again fulfilling its economic development potential. The Southeast Asian nation started out the year with mixed superlatives: home to the third-largest stretch of tropical…
JAKARTA — A court in Indonesia has ordered a subsidiary of the country’s second-biggest pulp and paper company to comply with a government order aimed at preventing land fires and…
New research demonstrates that sustainability certification through the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil does cut down on deforestation in Indonesia’s palm oil industry. But the new study, published online Monday by…
JAKARTA – The Indonesian government is working with peat experts to establish a global center for tropical peatlands just south of the capital, Jakarta. The details about the proposed institution,…
JAKARTA – A subsidiary of Indonesia’s second-largest pulp and paper firm is seeking to overturn a government decision to nix the company’s plans to operate on peatlands. PT Riau Andalan…
BONN, Germany – A few weeks ago, international scientists, government officials and forest advocates visiting a remote community in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) confirmed the presence of…
JAKARTA — Indonesia is taking a page out of Brazil’s playbook as it seeks to catch up on its carbon reduction commitments and net a financial windfall. Indonesia, a major…
Lokolama barely registers on atlases and maps. The small Pygmy village, home to a few hundred people, lies deep in the Congo Basin rainforest 48 kilometers (30 miles) south of…
Susilo sat attached to an oxygen tank instead of tending his vegetables. The 62-year-old farmer, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, had a long history of respiratory trouble,…
JAKARTA — Indonesia’s highest court has struck down a regulation obliging forestry companies to relinquish and protect carbon-rich concessions to prevent a recurrence of annual fires. The ruling was handed…
Last year the world lost an area of tree cover the size of New Zealand, according to satellite data. That’s around 29.7 million hectares (297,000 square kilometers) – and was…
(Baca dalam Bahasa Indonesia.) Prologue: Jakarta, 2007 On Nov. 29, 2007, on the tenth floor of a marble-clad office block in Jakarta, the scion of one of Indonesia’s wealthiest families met with…
(Read the first article in the series, "The palm oil fiefdom.") Indonesia, a nation of thousands of islands draped across the equator, is in the grips of a social and…
Despite decades of hard environmental battle against deforestation, tropical forest losses continue unabated. Forests are cut down to make way for cattle-grazing land, oil palm plantations or other non-forests uses.…
JAKARTA — After a year in which it destroyed over 1,000 hectares of peat swamp forest in violation of its own sustainability policy, palm oil giant Felda Global Ventures said…
JAKARTA -- The Indonesian government is struggling to collect fines from companies found guilty of damaging the environment, leaving trashed rainforests and peat swamps to stay barren as restoration work…
JAKARTA -- Indonesia, a country known for its annual forest and peat fires, is overhauling its peatland management policies, an effort triggered by the great fires of 2015. 2015 was…
JAKARTA -- Fire season has returned to Indonesia, marking the first real test of President Joko Widodo’s efforts to prevent a repeat of the 2015 haze crisis. Land and forest…
Prof. Simon Lewis, a co-author of an article on peatlands in the Congo Basin published in Nature, recently proposed to scientists working on tropical forests that they sign an open…
A recent report by conservation NGO Rainforest Foundation UK (RFUK) is decrying what they say is Norwegian government complicity in funding a project they allege could result in the clearance…
JAKARTA -- A new palm oil bill is the latest battleground in the fight over how to regulate Indonesia’s plantation sector in the wake of the 2015 fire and haze…
Perhaps no forestry company operating in Indonesia was more controversial from the late 1990s to the early 2010s in environmental circles than Asia Pulp & Paper (APP). Throughout that period,…
PALANGKARAYA, Indonesia and JAKARTA -- One of the largest drainage canals ever dug through Indonesia’s peat swamps is being blocked in Kalimantan, the archipelago country’s portion of Borneo island, part…
Tropical rainforests have that name for a reason, occurring in high rainfall areas close to the equator with swirling mists shrouding their lofty heights and moist soil that squelches underfoot.…
The Norwegian parliament voted today to ban the public procurement and use of palm oil-based biofuel – purportedly becoming the first country to do so. "The [Parliament] calls on the government…
A new campaign by a leading environmental NGO offers a rare glimpse into the frontlines of Indonesia’s “deforestation crisis,” where communities are locked in land disputes with some of the…
JAKARTA -- Palm oil and paper lobby groups have asked Indonesia’s highest court to strike down rules holding plantation firms strictly liable for fires that occur on their land. The…
The West Kalimantan governor wants to exempt timber firms in the Indonesian province from a national ban on peatland drainage, drawing the ire of green groups who say such a…
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…
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…