Like with so many products, staring at the shelf of chocolate chips and baking bars can be overwhelming. What are the “right” labels to pay attention to: “Certified Compostable,” “Direct Trade” or “Fair Trade?” Does higher price mean better wages for the workers that produced it? Cacao is produced in humid regions near the equator […]
Deforestation is the clearing of forested land with the purpose of converting it to be used for something other than forest, including the raising of livestock, agriculture, mining, development or other non-forest uses.
It’s hard to imagine a world without palm trees. Members of the recognizable Arecaceae family drop coconuts onto white-sand beaches, pierce their fronds through the greenery of rainforests and line glamorous boulevards from Los Angeles to Miami. But a new study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution Monday warns that we might have to. A […]
London band Coldplay, who have been playing music together for more than two decades, have been dubbed “useful idiots for greenwashing” for partnering with Neste, a Finnish oil company, to cut the band’s touring emissions in half, reported The Guardian.
The Bogor Institute of Agriculture, a leading forestry university in Indonesia, is proposing a controversial plan: to define planting palm oil plantations as reforestation efforts. Typically creating palm oil plantations is considered deforestation, as it requires clearing native forests for monocultures.
Growing palm oil is notoriously bad for the environment, as creating the oil palm plantations requires extensive deforestation. This process destroys the habitats of orangutans, Sumatran rhinos, tigers and many other creatures. Now, a report shows that about one-fifth of the oil palm plantations in Indonesia are actually grown in forest estates, including protected forests […]
During 18 months, Mongabay investigated allegations challenging the “sustainable” status of the Brazilian palm oil supply chain, revealing impacts including deforestation and water contamination, and what appears to be an industry-wide pattern of brazen disregard for Amazon conservation and for the rights of Indigenous people and traditional communities in northern Pará state. In this behind-the-scenes […]
By Hans Nicholas Jong An Indonesian forestry company with possible links to pulpwood and palm oil powerhouse Royal Golden Eagle has cleared forests the size of 500,000 basketball courts since 2016, some of them home to critically endangered orangutans, according to a new report. Nusantara Fiber controls 242,000 hectares (598,000 acres) of industrial tree plantations […]
Over the past 40 years, about 50 percent of lowland rainforests in Southeast Asia have been converted for palm oil and other plantations, and remaining forests in the region are heavily logged, according to new research. Yet while the impacts of fragmentation on old-growth forests are well understood, how fragmentation impacts regenerating logged forests isn’t. […]