Indigenous people, environmentalists and industries vie for control over lands that can offer economic benefits or climate protection — but not always both.
Orangutans face a bleak future in Borneo, hammered by habitat loss to plantations and mines, poached for the illegal pet trade, and exterminated by farmers.
At least six illegal logging camps have sprung up in a peat forest in Indonesian Borneo that the government had declared off-limits last year, a Greenpeace investigation has revealed.
The consequences of today's destruction of nature will mainly affect future generations. This is the premise behind the Colombian supreme court's recent historic environmental decision: to accept the ideas presented by a group of Colombian children and other young people who say that the deforestation of the Amazon puts their livelihood at risk.
Of the nearly 3,000 villages located within peatlands throughout Indonesia, only one is permitted to manage the forest — a glaring omission that the government has been slow to address through its “social forestry" program.
When Makira Natural Park launched in 2005, it seemed to present a solution to one of the most intractable problems in conservation: finding a source of funding that could be counted on year after year.
