By Chris Mooney 7 February 2018 (The Washington Post) – The much-heralded demise of the coal industry may be overstated, a new scientific analysis asserts — finding that if all planned plants were constructed, the world would have little chance of meeting its climate change goals. The new study, by Ottmar Edenhofer of the Mercator […]
JAKARTA, 18 February 2018 (Mongabay) – Police in Indonesia have arrested and charged four farmers with the killing of an orangutan found shot more than 100 times. Investigators in East Kalimantan province, in Indonesian Borneo, detained the four men on 15 February 2018 and charged them the following day. They have been identified as 36-year-old […]
15 February 2018 (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) – Nearly 50 years of conservation efforts have been unable to prevent orangutan numbers on Borneo from plummeting. The latest data published by a team from 38 international institutions, led by researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, the German Centre […]
The Eagle Creek wildfire burns as golfers play at the Beacon Rock Golf Course in North Bonneville, Washington, 4 September 2017. [more] Pictures of the year: Natural disasters Extreme heat in Indonesia: A freshly-scorched landscape in Pekanbaru, Indonesia in August 2017, after a fire caused by hot temperatures and lack of rain. [more] The impact […]
By Scilla Alecci 8 November 2017 (ICIJ) – On the island of Padang, in the heart of Indonesia’s industrial logging country, a group of teenagers pointed to the charred remains of sago palm trees – the remnants of the fires that have scorched the archipelago nation’s lush forests for two decades. “There’s a sense of […]
By Jeffery Gettleman 4 November 2017 MBANDAKA, Democratic Republic of Congo (The New York Times) – The sting began, as so many things do these days, on social media. Daniel Stiles, a self-styled ape trafficking detective in Kenya, had been scouring Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp for weeks, looking for pictures of gorillas, chimps or orangutans. […]
By Hans Nicholas Jong 29 October 2017(Mongabay) – The wholesale destruction of rainforests across parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra island to make way for cash-crop plantations has not just devastated animal and plant biodiversity in the region, but may also be driving an alarming rise in temperatures on the ground, a new study suggests. Average temperatures […]
By Alister Doyle 23 October 2017 OSLO (Reuters) – Forest fires in Brazil and Indonesia contributed to a record loss in global tree cover in 2016, equivalent to the size of New Zealand, that could accelerate deforestation blamed for climate change, an independent forest monitoring network said on Monday.Man-made global warming increased the risks of […]
13 October 2017 (United Nations) – Sudden onset disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and tropical cyclones, are likely to displace nearly 14 million people worldwide each year, warns a United Nations-backed study released Friday – International Day for Disaster Reduction.“This is an important baseline against which we can measure progress in reducing disaster risk. […]
28 September 2017 (WHRC) – A revolutionary new approach to measuring changes in forest carbon density has helped WHRC scientists determine that the tropics now emit more carbon than they capture, countering their role as a net carbon “sink.” The shift from carbon sink to carbon “source” was caused by widespread deforestation, degradation and disturbance, […]
