Mongabay

Palm oil production in Indonesia often comes at the expense of traditionally managed lands as well as the livelihoods of indigenous communities, causing widespread conflict in the archipelago country. With oil palm cultivation set to double in Indonesia over the next 10 years, methods for understanding ...

Indonesia cannot be held liable for $2 billion in compensation sought by Churchill Mining for the revocation of a coal-mining concession, the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes ruled in a Dec. 6 verdict. The tribunal determined that Churchill’s claim to the ...

The murder of a Myanmarese reporter investigating illegal logging and the roadside beating of another, both in Myanmar earlier this week, have raised new fears about media safety in the country. Soe Moe Tun, a 37 year-old Myanmarese reporter with Daily Eleven newspaper, was found “severely ...

Rainforest cover in the Indonesian archipelago has since declined rapidly in recent years giving way to large-scale plantations of rubber and oil palm. A recent study published in Nature Communications finds that small-scale farming can be just as damaging to biodiversity as the plantations, since ...

Sixty-nine million people were exposed to toxic haze as a result of last year’s devastating wildfires in Indonesia, a new study has found. Little is known about the health impacts of Indonesia’s annual fires, which spread uncontrollably because the country’s vast peat swamp zones have ...

Bombs and biodiversity can go hand in hand, a new study has found. Military training areas — used for the training of armed forces — can maintain biodiversity and even support species threatened with extinction, despite years of repeated bombing, fires and other disturbances, scientists ...

The 22nd United Nations climate summit began as a wonky, low-profile affair. Nearly 200 nations, finally agreeing to keep the world from burning up, began writing the rulebook by which the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement could be achieved, while seeking the trillions needed ...

The first containers of plywood certified as legal under the EU’s anti-illegal-logging action plan were shipped out of the Indonesian capital on November 15, a milestone in the fight against blackmarket timber in one of the world’s most heavily forested countries. Of the 15 nations that ...

The inclusion of the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation program, known as REDD+, as a standalone article in the Paris Climate Agreement was widely hailed as an encouraging political signal that protecting forests and other valuable carbon sinks would henceforth be a ...

Early this year, many Mekong Delta farmers fought a losing battle against an epic drought, the worst since 1926. Was the drought a harbinger of climate change? Perhaps it was, but more certainly it was an artifact of El Niño. The same ocean-warming phenomenon that ...