Following plans to amend the Aboriginal People’s Act of 1954, Native Customary Land Rights have been a spotlight issue in Malaysia. Read more below about the United Nations promise to local native communities to engage the Malaysian government on issues relating to their rights. Read more on Free Malaysia Today...
Despite a growing population and export economy, the conversion of primary forests for industrial agriculture has slowed in Costa Rica. Read more below about Costa Rica’s ban on clearing of mature forests and how this has encouraged the development of non-forest land. Read more on Mongabay Read more about Forest...
Following the Forest Stewardship Council’s (FSC) decision to cut ties with logging giant, APRIL and banning them from use of any FSC trademarks, WWF, Greenpeace, and the Rainforest Action Network are calling on other certification schemes to cut ties with this leading deforester. Read more about this call to action...
New research has found that even small climate changes are linked to increases in human conflict worldwide including personal violence and crime such as murder, inter-group violence and political instability, and institutional breakdowns. Read more below about this comprehensive study and what this will mean for a warming world. Read...
Angko and Bagong were stunned as they watched they graves of their relatives and eight generations of ancestors being bulldozed as the land was cleared for oil palm seedling planting. Read more below about how these native people are fighting back in court against these grave injustices. Read more on...
By Jettie Word, Borneo Project Director I am so lucky. I am lucky that my anthropologist mother brought me to Indonesian Borneo when I was nine years old. I am lucky that I got to live there while much of the forest was still intact and the rivers ran clean....
Illegal open burning is being blamed for the choking smog characteristic of Indonesia’s dry season but environmentalists allege that this illegal activity persists because officials are being bribed to ignore illegal forest fires. Read more below about these investigations and the warnings of the fires to come in 2014. ...
On his 50th anniversary of uninterrupted public office, Sarawak’s Chief Minister, Abdul Taib Mahmud, commented on the ‘lack of progress’ achieved by Dayaks during his tenure and suggested that he would be the one to provide a solution. Read more below about this proposition and why many point to Taib...
Over the last few weeks and months, I have followed the spread of the haze from the fires in Sumatra, which have inundated Singapore and peninsular Malaysia, with a mixture of both sadness and deja vu. I lived in Indonesian Borneo during the infamous fires of the late 1990s, when...
The Forest Research Institute Malaysia (FRIM) announced that the last of keruing paya (Dipterocarpus coriaceus) in Peninsular Malaysia were wiped out when more than 450 hectares Bikam Forest Reserve in Perak were cleared for oil palm plantations. Read more below about this endemic tree and the impacts of palm oil...
