Environmental Auditors Approve Green Labels for Products Linked to Deforestation and Authoritarian Regimes

Major environmental auditing firms ignore or fail to recognize glaring environmental damage caused by loggers and other clients whose practices they certify as sustainable, undercutting an elaborate global system meant to fight forest destruction and climate change. With alarming frequency, the auditors and so-called certification firms validate products linked to deforestation, logging in conflict zones […]

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EU ‘moving the goal posts’ with new timber requirement, Indonesia says

BERLIN — Indonesian officials have slammed the European Union’s proposal of a regulation that they say negates more than a decade of progress by the Southeast Asian country to comply with EU sustainable timber rules. Under a voluntary partnership agreement, or VPA, signed in 2011, Indonesia developed a system, known as the SVLK, to verify […]

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Report unveils ties between Indonesian conglomerate Sinar Mas and Canada’s Paper Excellence

JAKARTA —Indonesian conglomerate Sinar Mas, which has a long history of deforestation and conflicts with local Indigenous communities, secretly controls Canadian paper and packaging company Paper Excellence, which could soon become one of the biggest pulp and paper suppliers in North America, a new investigative report has alleged. The report, Papering over Corporate Control, was […]

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Mongabay reporter sued in what appears to be a pattern of legal intimidation by Peruvian cacao company

Global Forest Watch tree cover loss 2001-2021 set on Planet imagery from Jun-Sep 2020.In November 2020, Peruvian cacao company Tamshi filed a lawsuit against Mongabay Latam staff reporter Yvette Sierra Praeli for “aggravated defamation” over her reporting of a government investigation into the firm’s activities in the Peruvian Amazon. While the case was formally dismissed by a Peruvian court last month, it wasn’t the first time that Tamshi […]

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