Mongabay
Indigenous groups, activists risk arrest to blockade logging in Malaysia
In their fight for the rights of peninsular Malaysia’s native people, the Orang Asli, an alliance of women are making waves in the country’s highly conservative society as they support the efforts of communities and activists trying to stop logging of the region’s forests. The ...
Trump failure to lead on climate doesn’t faze UN policymakers in Bonn
Kaisa Kosonen, a political advisor on climate action for Greenpeace in Germany is prepping for the mid-year United Nations climate conference in Bonn, running May 8-18. But she pauses to answer my question. Here’s the set up, I say: Under President Obama, the U.S. played ...
RSPO freezes palm oil company’s operations in Papua
The world’s biggest sustainable palm oil association has frozen the operations of one of its most prominent members on concessions in Indonesia because of failures to meet its standards on new planting. The Complaints Panel of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil issued a stop-work order ...
Indigenous communities resisting dams in Indonesia claim they face repression, rights abuses
In October 2014, when developers entered Seko and Central Seko to begin preliminary work on a 480-megawatt hydroelectric dam, the communities living there say no one asked their permission. The area, in the Seko Subdistrict of North Luwu, in the southern part of Indonesia’s Sulawesi ...
The meat hook: satiating Asia’s demand for beef
Beef has never been a favored meat in most of Asia. Cows are harder to raise than chickens and pigs, which take up less space and can be fed scraps. A large majority of India practices Hinduism, a religion that reveres cows. Islamic societies, too, ...
Overestimated range maps used for endemic birds in India’s Western Ghats lead to underestimated threats, study finds
New research suggests that the International Union for the Conservation of Nature is overestimating the ranges of several bird species endemic to the Western Ghats mountain range in India, which can have major implications for determining the extinction threat faced by those species. The IUCN ...
Forest conservation might be an even more important climate solution than we realize: study
It’s estimated that deforestation is responsible for about 10 percent of global carbon emissions. Of course, in addition to the direct emissions created, the destruction of a forest means the removal of a valuable carbon sink, as well, which is why deforestation represents a “double ...
Scientists launch global search for 25 ‘lost’ species
Unseen for decades in the wild, many species are now feared extinct. Some exist only as museum specimens, others are only known from old drawings or photographs. But some of these missing species may still be out there, lurking in remote, unexplored regions of our planet. And to ...
Documenting the fight to save Borneo’s animals
After graduating from school, Aaron “Bertie” Gekoski was on a fairly conventional career path for a young businessman, starting out in copyediting for a magazine before launching a modeling agency in London. But the more successful his agency became, the more Gekoski felt like something ...
Nepal tests fencing approach to protect farms and elephants
“We are not angry with the elephant and know that we need to protect it, but we also need to protect ourselves”. This is a brave statement by Kaushala Budha, a Nepali farmer in the Patabhar hamlet, whose house had been nearly destroyed by a ...
