Indonesia

The wildlife of Indonesia now often looks like relatively unique to those islands. This is not the natural state of affairs. 60,000 years ago, a cousin of the orangutan lived on the mainland. Unfortunately, what appears clear, is that humans were responsible for the extinction of these animals as with so many more. There are …

Continue reading "The Indonesian rhinos that once roamed across much of Asia"

The clean energy transition is accelerating in some parts of the world. It is often cheaper to install solar or wind turbines, than to continue to buy coal to keep using the coal power plant, never-the-less this has not stopped developing countries from failing to make the change.

The concern by those who work in tourism with the Komodo dragons seems quite justified. They fear that this enormous increase in price will put off people from visiting, and therefore completely destroy the tourism industry. It should be noted that this is merely the fee to visit the islands, anything the guides charge is …

Continue reading "Workers strike as Indonesia increases fee to visit Komodo dragons is increase by more than 18 times to £205"

It seems that so long as the initial cause of the deforestation was not palm oil (or perhaps not the current owners of the palm oil farm?), then even if it is immediately converted into palm oil plantations, it can be counted as sustainable. This is absurd. It should obviously be the case that if …

Continue reading "A study found that 3/4 of oil palm concessions in Indonesia and Malaysian Borneo certified by RSPO were forest or wildlife habitat just 30 years ago!"

Many of the Indonesian forest reserves, have become paper parks, with much or most of the forestation and other vegetation lost. They clear land in the hope that they will eventually be given the title to the land to make their seizures legal. Under their new program “conservation partnership”, the settlers acknowledge that they cannot …

Continue reading "In an effort to deal with encroachment into national parks Indonesia is trying a new policy"

The USA has rather embarrassed itself. A large minority of the country has kept stating things that were obviously foolish. In particular, Donald Trump has spent the 4 years of his administration undermining all of the science and therefore the gradual move towards acceptance of the the facts that most of the rest of the …

Continue reading "Only Indonesia and Saudi Arabia have a higher proportion of climate change denial than the USA"

Seemingly, often as a result of mapping issues (though this may not have been accidental) Unesco sites and land mapped as Orangutan habitat have been turned into plantations. The idea that 1/5 of the plantations fall into this category is hard to explain – not surprisingly this is explicitly illegal.

This proposal would mean that Indonesia could cut down all its rainforest and replace them with Palm Oil, and would have engaged in zero deforestation. This has to be condemned globally, There are myriad problems with this. The destruction of the rainforest would release billions of tonnes of carbon into the air. Palm oil, will …

Continue reading "Indonesias leading University has proposed classifying Palm oil as a forest crop – This is insane, read on to find more – urgent condemnation needed"

This encompasses an area about the size of South Carolina, and is made up of about 75% forest with the rest peat. Much wildlife live in these forests including orangutans, so this move is good for both carbon emissions and biodiversity.

The country of Indonesia consists of many islands. Due to their relative size, these islands have led to many subspecies of animals adapting.  In the past tigers existed on at least three of these islands. These animals once lived on Java and Bali, but now there is only a small population in Sumatra.  In Java …

Continue reading "Illegal trade in Indonesian leopards is booming"

In a judgement handed down in 2017, a court ruled that the Indonesian government must unveil their maps showing what land use has been decided where. The government is still fighting. It is odd that they are still fighting. In recent years there have been multiple problems where plantations have seemingly been given permission in …

Continue reading "Indonesian government is still fighting to hide bad behaviour"

I wrote the other day, about the ability of brewing palm oil, rather than creating huge estates to grow it. Perhaps these two issues could be combined to solve both problems Well a few months ago, Indonesia changed its regulations which would allow large areas of protected land to be cleared for food production.

It has come to light that two of the biggest paper pulp companies TPL and APRIL have been intentionally mislabeling their export materials.Paper grade pulp which they claimed to be exporting is used to make paper and packaging. However dissolving pulp, which they were actually exporting is far more valuable. As such they have cheated …

Continue reading "So the paper and pulp industry of Indonesia is cheating their government too: what a surprise"

The Indonesian government has decided to change the designation of large parts of the country from protected forest to available for food production.

The Indonesian government has promised to repair the damage done to the Tesso National Park. The park still has a population of Sumatran elephants and Sumatran tigers and as such is a highly important reserve that must remain. However much work is to be done as 75% of the park has been deforested and large …

Continue reading "Can Tesso National Park in Indonesia be saved and restored?"

The expansion of 1.06 million hectares, or 2.62 million acres of protected land is in theory fantastic news. Unfortunately Cambodia has not shown that it is the best in protecting its land set aside for wildlife anyway. Analysis suggests that much of this gained land appears to have come from nearby Biodiverse corridors, and many …

Continue reading "Is Cambodia expanding protected areas by over a million hectares?"

Generally great apes are animals that live in community. Indeed, one of the reasons that great apes developed such large brains is as a result of their need in social situations. Great apes (along with lesser monkeys, dolphins, bears and wolves, with a few more) require a large brain to remember things about the many …

Continue reading "Solitary male Orangutans peek on locals"

Rhino poaching is devastating rhino populations across Africa and Asia. Many species such as the Indonesian species are already lost or on the brink. African species are not far behind. If you have a strong constitution, do look up images. They are not nice particularly if you have seen this animal alive, as such I …

Continue reading "Poachers killed 24 rhinos in the last two weeks of 2021, that is the equivalent of 1000 a year"

I am intending to make this into a new set of articles that will appear on this website. Obviously, these species will not be the only ones that are covered – for those who read this website regularly, you will know that I talk about a wide range of species. The species that I am …

Continue reading "Species watch"

Today the Sumatran rhino is critically endangered. It is thought that not more than 80 exist in the wilds of Sumatra. Not particularly closely related to the Javan rhino, the Sumatran rhino once had a much larger range extending from foothills of the Eastern Himalayas in Bhutan and eastern India, through Myanmar, Thailand, possibly to Vietnam …

Continue reading "New baby girl! Sumatran rhino born in captivity in a breeding centre in Sumatra"