deforestation
Log and Burn, or Leave Alone? Indiana Residents Fight US Forest Service Over the Future of Hoosier National Forest
PAOLI, Indiana—When Jesse Laws rides her 7-year-old palomino, Roscoe, in Hoosier National Forest, she often steers his reins toward the tall pines. Needles carpet the trails, muting the clop of his shoes and shifting the feel of the air. “The ground stays moist there, so it’s cooler and so quiet,” says Laws, whose great grandparents […]
Read MoreShipibo communities create Indigenous guard to protect Peruvian Amazon from deforestation
Drug trafficking, logging, oil palm plantations, oil spills, highways, illegal fishing, expanding Mennonite communities — in the Peruvian Amazon, there’s no shortage of threats against Indigenous peoples or their lands. But now the Shipibo-Konibo-Xetebo people, living in the department of Ucayali, near the border with Brazil, have taken steps to protect themselves from the barrage […]
Indonesia, Malaysia deploy ministers to push back on EU palm oil restrictions
JAKARTA — Top officials from Indonesia and Malaysia, the world’s biggest palm oil producers, will meet European Union policymakers in Brussels amid a diplomatic standoff over a new deforestation rule that threatens to shut the commodity out of the EU market. The rule, formally adopted by the EU on May 16, bans the trading within […]
Forest conservation efforts in Peru are failing across the board, study says
Peru has attracted millions of dollars in forest conservation projects over the years, has a series of international agreements and targets to protect forests and has 254 public and private parks and protected areas — but these mechanisms have had little to no effect as deforestation skyrockets in the country, says a new study. Peru, […]
Venezuela’s hidden runways bring both life and destruction to Indigenous lands
SANTA ELENA DE UAIRÉN, Venezuela — Flying over a dense jungle in southern Venezuela, the sea of trees below is suddenly replaced by large patches of bare soil, tree stumps and the turquoise waters of ponds from abandoned gold mines. An airstrip 600 meters (about 2,000 feet) long marks the entrance to one of Venezuela’s […]
Indonesian project shows how climate funding can — and should — go directly to IPLCs
JAKARTA — Suryani grew up in a family of farmers on the island of Java in Indonesia. Her parents are members of a farmer’s union called SPP. The land they live and farm on isn’t titled, so Suryani knows very well the importance of having farmers’ land rights recognized and protected. Yet she’s also seen […]
New research finds slow forest recovery in the Andes — and ways to improve
Degraded by human activity, mountain forests across the tropical Andes are having a hard time bouncing back. But while scientists have long analyzed what drives their decline, they have largely understudied how these ecosystems, some of the world’s most biodiverse, behave after disruption. But a better insight into forest recovery pathways could help governments in […]
Amazon Rainforest loss could reach new height in just 5 years, study says
Within just five years, the Amazon Rainforest could lose half the total forest cover that it lost in the first 20 years of this century, a recent study has shown, as deforestation rates continue to accelerate in almost all nine Amazonian countries. From 2001-20, the rainforest lost 542,581 square kilometers (209,492 square miles), an area […]
Inaugural Indigenous women’s forum spotlights Congo Basin conservation
On May 8, the first forum of Indigenous women and local communities from Central Africa and the Congo Basin opened in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo. This forum, organized by the Network of Indigenous and Local People for the Sustainable Management of Forest Ecosystems in Central Africa and the NGO Rights and […]
EU deforestation tracking regulation sparks division among groups, producers
JAKARTA — As the European Union is set to adopt a landmark regulation that prohibits companies from trading commodities from deforested areas and illegal sources, the proposed law continues to be divisive. On one hand, governments of palm oil producing countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have rejected the law, saying its requirements are too strict […]