Indonesia’s peatland restoration claims in question as fires flare up

JAKARTA — Swaths of tropical peatland that were supposed to have been restored and protected from burning are among the fire-hit areas in Indonesia’s ongoing dry season, raising questions about the government’s claims of success in peat restoration. The Ministry of Environment and Forestry said more than 300 companies had restored some 3.7 million hectares […]

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Mongabay’s top Amazon stories from 2021

Fire line moves through a degraded forest area in an undesignated public forest area in Porto Velho, Rondônia on July 29, 2021. Photo © Christian Braga / GreenpeaceThe world’s greatest tropical rainforest continued to come under pressure in 2021, due largely to the policies of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Deforestation rates hit a 15-year-high, while fires flared up again, combining to turn Brazil’s portion of the Amazon into a net carbon source for the first time ever. But the rainforest as a […]

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2019 fires in Indonesia were twice as bad as the government claimed, study shows

JAKARTA — In 2019, fires raged through Indonesia’s rainforests and peatlands, sparked by the deliberate burning of land for agriculture, and fanned by an El Niño system bringing drier-than-usual weather conditions. Ultimately, the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry would put the total affected area at 1.64 million hectares (4.05 million acres), an area half […]

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New areas of primary forest cleared in Brazil’s ‘lawless’ Lábrea

Satellite imagery reveals several areas of primary rainforest were cleared alongside agricultural fields in the Brazilian Amazon, all in close proximity to Indigenous and protected lands. In March, the Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) lab at the University of Maryland detected areas of newly cleared forest in Lábrea municipality, in the state of Amazonas. […]

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The Brazilian Amazon is burning, again

Live hotspots in areas with Prodes 2019 and Deter warnings, in Colniza, Mato Grosso state. Taken 17 Aug, 2020. CREDIT: © Christian Braga / GreenpeaceIn recent weeks, nine major fires have ignited in the Brazilian Amazon, heralding the start of another fire season which, after a particularly dry year, experts say could be a bad one. “The rainy season is already finished and it was a bad [dry] rainy season,” Marcelo Seluchi, a meteorologist in Brazil’s national space research […]

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