By FRAN RIMRODNovember 11, 2009 – 10:40AM There are fears the oil that spewed from a leaking well off the West Australian coast has polluted a stretch of the Indonesian coastline, jeopardising the local fishing industry. The Greens are calling on operator PTTEP Australasia to compensate West Timorese fishing communities in West Timor if reports […]
By Rhett A. Butler, www.mongabay.comNovember 10, 2009 Forty percent of lowland forests in Sumatra and Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) were cleared from 1990 to 2005, reports a high resolution assessment of land cover change in Indonesia. The research, conducted by Matthew Hansen of South Dakota State University, and colleagues, found that Indonesia lost 21.35 million hectares […]
An environmental lawyer in Indonesia says local fishermen are going bankrupt because the Timor Sea oil spill has ruined fish stocks. The West Atlas oil rig spewed hundreds of thousands of litres of oil and gas into the sea for 10 weeks and last week caught fire. It was plugged earlier this week with mud. […]
By Rebecca Lindsey, NASA’s Earth Observatory More than two months after a blowout at a newly dug oil well, crude oil and gas condensate continued to leak into the Timor Sea, between northwest Australia and Indonesia. According to news reports, the company responsible for the leaking well has tried to cap it three times without […]
By Phil Mercer, Sydney, 20 October 2009 Australia’s worst oil slick since the mid-1980s is now tainting Indonesian waters. Fishermen in West Timor say contaminated fish are making villagers ill. Oil began leaking two months ago, following an accident on the West Atlas drilling platform, which lies about 200 kilometers off the coast of Western […]
By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent Lush tropical rainforest once covered almost all of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands between the Indian and Pacific oceans. And just half a century ago, 80 per cent remained. But since then, rampant logging and burning has destroyed nearly half that cover, and made the country the world’s third largest emitter of […]
(a) Protected and unprotected forests in 1990 for the main island of Sumatra and the smaller island of Siberut, including adjacent unprotected land lying within 10 km of protected area (PA) boundaries and the wider unprotected landscape, and showing the spatial distribution of the 1264 sample cells (25 km2). (b) Remaining forests in 2000, deforestation […]
By Tomasz Johnson, special to mongabay.com A chainsaw chugs into life and tears into the trunk of a tree as tall as a two-storey house. Petrol and man work together as the chain sets its teeth into the wood and edges its way through. The tree creaks, leans, and falls with a great crash to […]
ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2009) — Unusually high temperatures in the Arctic and heavy rains in the tropics likely drove a global increase in atmospheric methane in 2007 and 2008 after a decade of near-zero growth, according to a new study. Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, albeit a distant second. […]
A report released by the Indonesian government shows the country is the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter, largely as a result of the destruction of rainforests and carbon-dense peatlands. Indonesia accounts for 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. The ‘National Council on Climate Change’ report reveals that degradation and destruction of peatlands (45 […]
