Following a litany of conferences and calls that stress the urgency to address climate change, there’s growing interest and investments in nature to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Protecting and restoring natural ecosystems, such as forests, grasslands, wetlands, farmlands and oceans, could remove at least 10 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2050, according to […]
JAKARTA Indonesia and Malaysia, the world’s top two producers of palm oil, have set up a joint task force with the European Union to address their differences over a new law making it harder for the ubiquitous commodity to enter the EU. The governments of Indonesia and Malaysia, which together account for about 85% […]
JAKARTA Only a fifth of Indonesian palm oil companies are compliant with a requirement to allocate part of their land to smallholder farmers, according to official data. The government’s audit agency, the BPKP, found that only 21% of 2,864 plantation firms in the country had allocated the mandatory 20% of their concessions to communities under […]
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project and New Mandala. “Please tell me how I can make companies obey the law,” the official said. He was exasperated by the companies whose oil palm plantations saturated the subdistrict he headed in Indonesia, the world’s largest palm oil producer. Their managers refused to give him information, […]