A landmark EU anti-deforestation regulation that entered into force in June 2023 could come down hard on smallholder farmers in mainland Southeast Asia who produce a significant proportion of the…
JAKARTA — A court in Indonesia’s Riau province, the country’s palm oil heartland, has sentenced a high-ranking official to 12 years in prison for taking bribes in exchange for issuing…
JAKARTA — An Indonesian court has upheld a government decision to curb the expansion of a multibillion-dollar oil palm plantation project in the country’s easternmost region of Papua. In its…
SUMENEP, Indonesia — Small-scale fishers in Indonesia’s Masalembu Islands have filed a petition to the government calling for the establishment of an exclusive fishing zone off-limits to larger trawlers that…
MAKHASANENI, South Africa — In a village in the rolling hills of grassland, woodlands and scattered homesteads in South Africa’s picturesque KwaZulu-Natal province, a broil between traditional leaders and community…
BATAM, Indonesia — Indonesian authorities have called on their counterparts in neighboring Singapore to crack down on the illegal lobster larvae trade, given that the city-state is a key hub…
JAKARTA — A million-dollar bribery case in Indonesia’s Riau province, the country’s palm oil heartland, has prompted calls for a wider investigation into corruption between business players and the local…
ZARQA GOVERNORATE, Jordan; ERBIL, Iraq; QAMISHLI, Syria — In the darkness of a small, windowless room, half a dozen falcons were perched on low wooden stools, their eyes covered with…
LAMONGAN, Indonesia — The Brondong Fisheries Port in Indonesia’s East Java province was busy on a Friday morning in February as workers worked as swiftly as possible to unload the…
Foreign tuna fishing companies, mostly from Asia, have been exploiting Madagascar’s waters since the 1950s. The bloc that is now the European Union joined the hunt in 1986 and didn’t…
JAKARTA — Indonesia’s highest court has upheld a $61 million fine against an oil palm company over massive fires on its plantation that razed an area seven times the size…
JAKARTA — Only a fifth of Indonesian palm oil companies are compliant with a requirement to allocate part of their land to smallholder farmers, according to official data. The government’s…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has justified a sweeping amnesty for millions of hectares of oil palm plantations established illegally in forest areas, saying there are so many of them…
A four-day strike by nearly 2,000 Senegalese and Ivory Coast fishers who work on vessels owned by European companies operating in West African waters pulled back the cover on unfair…
A new investigation shows that farms located in the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau Indigenous Territory in the Brazilian Amazon supplied two JBS meatpacking plants that sell beef to brands of the French supermarket giant.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — The Kinjil Three languished in a jail cell an island away as demonstrators arrived outside a beige Jakarta office block and began distributing thousands of coins on…
Indonesian President Joko Widodo has warned of potentially dangerous weather conditions accelerating across the archipelago in the coming months, as the nation’s meteorology agency says more than half the country…
Anger over latest oil spill as Shell pipeline contaminates river and farms in Nigeria Nigeria’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) says an oil spill from Shell’s Trans…
Only 13 of some 60 men implicated in a human trafficking case in which Indonesian drug users were imprisoned under the guise of a rehabilitation program and forced to work…
JAKARTA — Indonesian prosecutors have charged three major palm oil companies in connection with a cooking oil shortage that rocked the world’s top producer of palm oil. The Attorney General’s…
Element Africa is Mongabay’s bi-weekly bulletin of brief stories from the extractives industry in Africa.
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government’s decision to revoke hundreds of logging, plantation and mining permits across the country is marred with irregularities including companies continuing to operate or engage in…
Indigenous groups are seeking urgent measures against the escalation of police violence they face in seeking to reclaim their ancestral lands in Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state. In most…
Rosaleen Duffy has long drawn the ire of those who support a forceful “guns and gates” approach to protecting wildlife. A professor of international politics at Sheffield University in the…
Police in Vietnam have detained prominent environmentalist Hoang Thi Minh Hong, known as Hong Hoang, on tax evasion charges frequently used against critics of the government’s environmental policies. Hong, who…
JAKARTA — Subsidiaries of some of the world’s biggest palm oil companies have been found guilty by Indonesia’s anticompetition watchdog of restricting sales of cooking oil amid acute shortages last…
KATHMANDU — In a landmark verdict, Nepal’s Supreme Court has directed the government to take concrete steps to implement the country’s conservation laws and seize illegal private collections of wildlife…
KERKENNAH ISLANDS, Tunisia — It’s a rainy afternoon in the port of Kraten, and all the fishing boats are docked, waiting for a winter storm to pass. Some fishers have…
On Saturday, May 13, Nguy Thi Khanh, the Goldman Environmental Prize-winning Vietnamese clean energy advocate, posted a surprising update on her personal Facebook page. The English translation read: “Endless happiness…
JAKARTA — A government audit on Indonesia's palm oil industry found that 9 million hectares (22.2 million acres) of concession holders — an area three times the size of Belgium…
