Philip Jacobson

PEKANBARU, Indonesia — Intensive efforts in recent years to prevent fires in Indonesia’s Riau province, the country’s perennial epicenter of forest and land fires, will be put to the test this year as the dry season makes a full return. At the heart of these efforts are community-led initiatives aim…

Each year, the European Union imports an estimated 4,000 metric tons of frogs’ legs. That sum is the equivalent of around 200 million frogs killed to feed demand, the majority of which are caught in the wild as part of a trade that’s unregulated and unsustainable, according to a group of conservationists and researchers. In […]

EAST LUWU, Indonesia — Environmental journalists investigating the impact of nickel mining on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have won a freedom-of-information ruling against local authorities, whose inability to release licensing information may point to an absence of licenses. The case centers on two nickel miners, PT Citra Lampia Mandiri (CLM) and PT Panca Digital […]

EAST TANJUNG JABUNG, Indonesia — Ambo Angke trudged through the cemetery knowing he had been right to worry. A high tide surge had inundated the resting place here on the eastern coast of Sumatra after developers ripped out the trees protecting the shoreline. “The mangroves were completely cleared,” Ambo, 48, told Mongabay Indonesia in November […]

More than a third of all elasmobranch (shark and ray) species are at risk of extinction due to overfishing. Indonesia is both a hotspot of elasmobranch biodiversity and one of the leading shark and ray exporters in the world, putting already critically endangered species such as hammerhead sharks and wedgefish under great pressure. Reducing that […]

In 2009, a group of Indonesian researchers published a report on the vulnerability to climate change of the eastern Indonesian island of Lombok, home to about 4 million people. Their prediction, based on International Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Emissions Scenarios projections, was that the sea level along the Lombok coast would rise […]

When the palm oil industry began growing rapidly in Indonesia in the 1980s, the government developed a scheme aimed at ensuring communities would benefit. To gain subsidized funding, companies routinely promised communities as much as 80% of their plantations, in plots known as “plasma.” By 2007, the principle was baked into law, with companies required […]

As mass coral bleaching events grow in frequency and intensity, scientists are finding out more about how corals, which make up the physical foundation of reefs, respond during times of heat stress. But what is less well known is how mass bleaching events affect other components of reef ecosystems, such as their amazingly colorful array […]

On his ninth birthday, Robertus Darren Radyan gave a present to each person who came to his party. Each guest got to take home a light-red flower pot that had a written appeal: “Take care of me. Save the Earth and Go Green!” Born in Jakarta in 2001, Darren discusses his schoolboy “go green” awareness […]

In Sumatra, villagers occupied an oil palm plantation and set tires on fire; in the Bangka-Belitung Islands, they filled the local parliament building demanding action; in Borneo, paramilitary police were deployed to control the protests. Each of these incidents appeared in local media reports in Indonesia in the past few years and told what was […]