Forests

Mount Mulanje’s bare granite face looms above the lush surrounding landscape. Said to be the inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lonely Mountain (home to Smaug the dragon), Malawi’s highest mountain also holds a treasure: a mating pair of spotted ground thrushes, one of the rarest birds in the world. “Ground thrushes are like the holy grail […]

JAKARTA — Indonesia, the world’s biggest producer of palm oil, owes a substantial slice of that output to criminal deforestation, according to a new report showing that a fifth of its plantations are illegally operating inside designated forest areas. These plantation operators are effectively destroying large swaths of carbon-rich rainforests, releasing huge amounts of greenhouse […]

JAKARTA — UNESCO has renewed its call for the closure of a road running through Indonesia’s Lorentz National Park after the nation’s environment minister said shutting it down would be impossible. The park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, encompasses a variety of biodiversity-rich ecosystems on the western coast of the island of New Guinea. BirdLife […]

International forest and climate experts have released a “playbook” for ecosystem restoration with a set of 10 principles that they say, if followed, could be a game-changer. The Political Ecology Playbook, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, recognizes that issues such as climate change and forest loss are not just biophysical and environmental problems, […]

More than 100 scientists have issued a letter urging U.S. President Biden and Congress to remove provisions promoting logging, forest biomass and fossil fuels from the multitrillion-dollar infrastructure and reconciliation (Build Back Better) bills.

The 2016 peace deal that the Colombian government reached with the country’s largest and oldest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), was also heralded as being strikingly “green.” The agreement set out to correct unequal land use caused by internal displacement while also investing in the management of protected reserves. But five […]

JAKARTA — Electric vehicles, solar power plants, biofuel, blue carbon, green bonds and the carbon market: all got a mention from Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo in his speech at the World Leaders Summit at the COP26 U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland. Conspicuously absent from his speech, however, was any commitment to protect the rights […]

JAKARTA — Indonesian officials have backtracked on the country’s pledge at the COP26 climate summit to end deforestation by 2030, calling it unfair and inappropriate to demand that it stop clearing the world’s third-largest swath of tropical rainforest. The flip-flop has prompted concerns among environmental activists that Indonesia — one of the world’s largest greenhouse […]

JAKARTA — A new web monitoring platform aims to achieve full traceability in palm oil supply chains and help companies to meet their zero-deforestation commitments — a goal that continues to elude the industry due to numerous challenges. Palm oil is a major driver of deforestation in the two countries that produce nearly 90% of […]

Like many rural families in Central America, Martín García and his sons devoted part of every growing season to slashing and burning a new strip of their land, knowing that it was the only way to make it fertile enough to yield food for everyone. They couldn’t grow on the land they had used in […]