Budiardi was one of the more colorful characters we met in our reporting for “ The palm oil fiefdom.” Thickset and outspoken, he was previously a member of the local…
Seemingly nondescript messes of tangled branches and exposed roots, mangrove forests cling to the coasts of many tropical countries. However, mangroves are far from unexceptional, providing critical ecosystem services like…
JAKARTA — An artist working with environmental activists has carved out a distress call from a stand of thousands of oil palm trees in a former plantation on the edge…
We met James Watt in his home village of Bangkal during the reporting of “The palm oil fiefdom,” in early 2017. Bangkal lies on the banks of Sembuluh, a sprawling…
JAKARTA — Forest fires are underway in Indonesia as the rainy season tails off, marking the return of potentially widespread burning that threatens to once again blanket parts of the…
JAKARTA — A team of scientists from Indonesia, Germany and the Netherlands has won a competition two years in the making to come up with a fast, accurate and cost-effective…
JAKARTA — Environmental issues in Indonesia will once again be both bargaining chip and valuable stake this year as the country prepares to hold sweeping elections, according to an environmental…
JAKARTA — The world lost nearly 150,000 orangutans from the island of Borneo in the past 16 years due to habitat loss and killing, and is on track to lose…
JAKARTA — Zely Ariane, an editor at the Tabloid Jubi newspaper in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua, gets frustrated each time an acquaintance travels there and asks to meet up…
KAMBIYAIN, Indonesia — The village of Kambiyain lies deep within the forests of Indonesian Borneo, well off the national grid, and the nights here are typically dark and silent, save…
ACEH, Indonesia — Deforestation slowed last year in the Indonesian province of Aceh, home to the Leuser Ecosystem biodiversity hotspot, according to a local forest watchdog. The province, which spans…
JAKARTA — More than a hundred palm oil and pulp companies in Indonesia have pledged to restore a combined area of peat forest the size of the state of Connecticut,…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has reported a second straight annual decline in the country’s deforestation rate, but continues to confound with its definition of what constitutes a forest. The…
JAKARTA — The daunting task of mapping Indonesia’s vast peatlands in painstaking detail has entered the home stretch, as competing proposals vie for selection as the standard to be adopted…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has acquiesced to the reality that local and indigenous communities already manage land within conservation areas, saying it will begin formalizing this de facto stewardship…
JAKARTA — Of the nearly 3,000 villages located within peatlands throughout Indonesia, only one is permitted to manage the forest — a glaring omission that the government has been slow…
JAKARTA — Experts and officials have taken issue with a new study that warns of hefty economic losses as a result of the Indonesian government’s policies to protect peatlands from…
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 – The clearing of Indonesia’s last untouched swath of pristine forest has begun in earnest, with an area the size of Washington, D.C., razed for just a single oil…
JAKARTA – The Indonesian government has unveiled an ambitious plan to nearly halve the number of fire hotspots in the country by 2019, in part through the restoration of degraded…
