JAKARTA — Despite various commitments from global brands and the government to protect Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem, home to some of the rarest species on Earth, development of new palm oil…
JAKARTA — Critics have questioned the Indonesian government’s priorities as it prepares to evict longtime residents of a small island to make way for a $25 billion development that includes…
JAKARTA — Parts of Indonesia are covered with toxic air pollutants from burning lands and forests as this year’s fire season is intensifying amid the El Niño weather phenomenon, which brings drier…
JAKARTA — A court in Indonesia’s Riau province, the country’s palm oil heartland, has sentenced a high-ranking official to 12 years in prison for taking bribes in exchange for issuing…
JAKARTA — A million-dollar bribery case in Indonesia’s Riau province, the country’s palm oil heartland, has prompted calls for a wider investigation into corruption between business players and the local…
MENDAHARA ULU, Indonesia — At the end of 2018, three communities in this subdistrict on the island of Sumatra were given rights to manage their local peatland by Indonesian President…
SAROLANGUN, Indonesia — On a night in early July, Solikin was awake chasing elephants past sunrise. The animals had entered the community’s oil palm fields and raised hell, mashing hundreds…
JAKARTA — Major investors continue to sour on a hydropower project being built in an orangutan habitat in Indonesia, with the powerful Norwegian state pension fund the latest to call…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government plans this year to recognize community claims to ancestral forests in the Sumatran province of Aceh for the first time in history. The Ministry of…
Margaret Kinnaird has worked in conservation for decades, from North America to Africa. But it was only when she started working in Indonesia that she heard the acronym NATO, or…
Indonesia’s oldest women’s Islamic organization will prepare volunteers in Kalimantan and Sumatra to open clean air sanctuaries, should a strengthening El Niño accelerate wildfires over the coming months. “We will…
JAKARTA — Male orangutans that resettle to a new area appear to be imitating the behavior of local individuals in an effort to survive and find a future home range,…
Editor's note: Mongabay has withdrawn this article from publication. On July 6, Mongabay published a news article based on a scientific journal article entitled "Prioritization of peatland restoration and conservation…
Indonesian President Joko Widodo has warned of potentially dangerous weather conditions accelerating across the archipelago in the coming months, as the nation’s meteorology agency says more than half the country…
When battling to protect Indonesia's peatlands during wildfire crises in 2015 and 2019, most volunteer firefighters confronted the infernos with a dire shortage of equipment and technological resources. For community…
Beatboxing became popular in the 1980s, when Doug E. Fresh performed the style around the New York City hip-hop scene. However, the seeds of this vocal technique, which involves making…
JAKARTA — Small-scale and traditional fishers make the greatest contribution to Indonesia’s total fish production, driving the country’s rise as one of the world’s top fishing nations. In an effort…
Only 13 of some 60 men implicated in a human trafficking case in which Indonesian drug users were imprisoned under the guise of a rehabilitation program and forced to work…
BATANGHARI, Indonesia — In a sweltering oil palm field in Batanghari village, Rokani fixes a sickle to an 11-meter (36-foot) pole and begins cutting down bunches of fruit from the…
JAMBI — A quintet of Jambi residents gathered one morning in May at the home of Leni Haini, an Indonesian environmental activist who last year received a prestigious award from…
TALANG PARIT, Indonesia — For more than two decades, the residents of this Indigenous community in Riau province, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, have watched as their lakes dried…
SIBAGANDING, Indonesia — After Abdulrahman Manik's father passed away in 2019, the young man inherited a duty to protect wild monkeys here in the north of Sumatra Island. Years later,…
In 2019, the last Sumatran rhino in Malaysia died. Her name was Iman and ever since her capture in 2014, she had been under the care of the Bornean Rhino…
JAKARTA — A decade of protection and natural regeneration of tropical forests has helped bird populations increase in the southern lowlands of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island, but continued wild trapping by…
JAMBI, Indonesia — The lunchtime rush is well underway as customers file into a lively Padang-style restaurant here in the city of Jambi on Indonesia’s Sumatra Island. A clutch of…
JAKARTA — When Indonesia embarked on its Mega Rice Project in the mid-1990s, it cleared vast swaths of forest for farmland, mostly in the peatlands of Borneo — only to…
JAKARTA — When scientists made the bombshell announcement in 2017 that the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis) was a new species, the apes were immediately put under the global spotlight. With…
JAKARTA — Deforestation associated with oil palm cultivation has declined in recent years in Indonesia, but in a biodiversity haven at the northern tip of Sumatra, the forest is being…
In Sumatra, villagers occupied an oil palm plantation and set tires on fire; in the Bangka-Belitung Islands, they filled the local parliament building demanding action; in Borneo, paramilitary police were…
PALEMBANG, Indonesia — Lithan, 68, grew up eating fish caught from the rivers and freshwater swamps near his village in Ogan Ilir district, near the southern tip of the island…
