JAKARTA — Environmental activists have blasted threats by a senior Indonesian minister that the country will withdraw from the Paris climate accord over a European plan to phase out palm…
JAKARTA — Indonesia has restored degraded peatlands the size of a million football fields in the three years since President Joko Widodo launched an ambitious program aimed at preventing a…
JAKARTA/PONTIANAK/PEKANBARU — Like their compatriots across Indonesia, a group of residents in the Bornean city of Pontianak celebrated the country’s Independence Day on Aug. 17 with a flag-raising ceremony. But…
JAKARTA — The threat of haze from another season of forest fires on Indonesia’s Sumatra Island hangs over Asia’s biggest sporting event, scheduled to kick off later this month. Authorities…
KIRAM, Indonesia — The well-being of tens of thousands of athletes and spectators at Asia’s biggest sporting event later this year will depend on an unusual pair: palm oil and…
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…
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,…
(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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
International and Indonesian NGOs are calling on the country’s largest paper company to stop using drained peat swamps for industrial agriculture. The practice, which relies on drying out the waterlogged…
Loans and credit from the British bank HSBC have helped support the unsustainable clearing of forests for oil palm plantations in Indonesia, Greenpeace said in a report published Tuesday. The…
PALANGKARAYA, Indonesia — The road from this inland provincial capital in southern Borneo to the delta city of Banjarmasin is littered with degraded forests and peat swamps, hallmarks of a…
Indonesia’s peat restoration agency is advocating for greater foreign investment to fill an expected funding shortfall in the government's plan to rehabilitate more than 2 million hectares of peat across…
The health ministries of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore have played down a study by Harvard and Columbia universities estimating a mean of more than 100,000 premature deaths resulting from the…
A NASA satellite detected 140 hotspots in West Kalimantan on Monday as smallholders in the province continued to burn land for agriculture, Indonesia’s disaster management agency said on Tuesday. Data…
The Indonesian government is investigating a Korean palm oil giant accused of burning land in the archipelagic country’s easternmost province of Papua. In response to an NGO report alleging that…
ome August in Kapuas Hulu, West Kalimantan, it is time for the indigenous Dayak Iban to burn the land and plant the dry rice, or ladang, that will feed them…
Pulp and paper supplier PT Bumi Mekar Hijau has been declared guilty of causing fires in South Sumatra by an appeals court in the Indonesian province, reversing a decision that…
Singapore’s National Environment Agency said on Friday it expected air quality to remain poor into the weekend as Indonesian disaster management officials cautioned that wildfires in Sumatra and Kalimantan could…
The Indonesian agency set up to prevent a recurrence of last year’s devastating forest and peatland fires is calling for all peat domes in the country to be designated as…
On July 23 the local police headquarters in the Sumatran province of Riau released SP3 notices related to 15 companies that the Ministry of Environment and Forestry had listed in…
In April, Indonesian president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo declared a moratorium on new licenses to establish palm oil plantations, a decision welcomed by advocates for the environment and indigenous rights. More…
ndonesia’s Ogan Komering Ilir was an epicenter of last year’s disastrous forest and peatland fires. It is one of four districts in which the newly created Peatland Restoration Agency is…
The Indonesian forestry ministry is on board with President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo’s plan to ban new oil palm permits, and has rejected all outstanding requests to establish plantations in the…
The prospects for greater international collaboration in the effort to prevent another Southeast Asian haze crisis hit a bump in the road this week, with Jakarta taking umbrage at Singapore’s threat…