By Mark Sheehan Deforestation has been a serious global problem for several decades. Illegal logging has been happening for decades; wildfires and other disasters take their toll as well. Enforcing laws can be a dangerous game and reforestation cannot keep up. Drones are changing the way we combat these losses….
Borneo’s stunningly biodiverse forests have been shrinking at alarming rates with trees being felled unceasingly for timber or so that palm oil plantations can take their place. Yet it’s not just the island’s forests that are reaching a crisis point. So are the forests of the Amazon, which too are…
It’s many a wildlife-loving child’s dream: an elephant coming to school to enliven the daily tedium of classes. In one school in Sabah that dream came true on a recent morning when a wild elephant suddenly showed up in school and walked through the canteen. Then again, the sight of…
If people had been doing this to other people, we’d call it genocide. Yet that’s what people have been doing to Borneo’s orangutans: perpetrating a form of eco-genocide against them. To wit: in this new century as many as 100,000 of the critically endangered primates have died off on the…
A male orangutan was found dead by villagers in East Kutai district in Indonesian Borneo. His body had been riddled with air gun pellets, some 130 shots in all. The ape had also been attacked with a machete. “We found pellets all over its body. There were also a number…
Chalk one up to Malaysian palm oil companies. In late January, European lawmakers approved a new energy plan for the 28-member economic zone that included an impeding ban on the use of palm oil in motor fuels on the continent from 2021 onwards. Malaysian palm oil producers and their allies…
Recently 4,515 hectares of a permanent forest reserve was degazetted in Terengganu, allowing for it to be turned into an oil palm plantation by a government-linked company, TDM Berhad. That means that on an area the size of more than 4,500 football fields where now trees stand will soon be lost,…
“Crop apartheid.” It is with this strange neologism that Malaysia’s plantations minister Mah Siew Keong has branded the European Union’s decision to ban on the use of palm oil in biofuels from countries like Malaysia, where the mass cultivation of the crop has inflicted grave and irreversible harm on the natural…
Clouded leopards are elusive creatures that hunt at night and spend most of their time away from prying eyes within dense forests. Thus, estimating their numbers in places like Sabah’s forests is a challenging undertaking. Yet a team of scientists led by researchers at Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU)…
Deforestation continues apace in Sarawak, and much of that deforestation is illegal, or at the very least suspect. Sarawak needs to ensure that no forest is cleared illegally and that all trees that are cut down are done so in a sustainable manner. With this in mind, the prominent conservationist…
The results are in and they aren’t all that encouraging: some two-thirds of 47 companies in Singapore and Malaysia surveyed by the World Wide Fund for Nature may be using palm oil obtained in unsustainable ways. We don’t know if they indeed are because they won’t tell. Sad, yes. Palm…
In a tropical country like Malaysia where vast amounts of water can pour down from the sky in a few short minutes, flash floods are nothing unusual. Yet the severity of deluges can be influenced by manmade causes. These include mudslides and landslides on hillsides denuded of trees that would…
If palm oil companies are known for something, it’s deforestation, not reforestation. Yet the Malaysian palm oil company Felda Global Ventures (FGV) is about to rehabilitate 1,000 hectares of peat forest in West Kalimantan, in Indonesia’s section of Borneo. The reason: pressure from consumers and environmentalists. “Corporate ‘no deforestation’ policies…
Orangutans in Borneo’s jungles have been facing grim prospects. Relentless deforestation has been depriving them of their traditional habitats. All they can do in the face of encroaching development is to seek refuge in denser vegetation in the hope of staying out of sight and out of harm’s way. Unless…
Whether we like it or not, palm oil production accounts for a major part of Malaysia’s economy. On the one hand, the industry has generated plenty of income for the country’s economy and created plenty of jobs as well, although most of those jobs are low-skilled and badly paid ones….
The natural environment isn’t something “out there”; rather, it’s an integral part of who we are as a species and as a people. That’s why we must stop destroying forests. By protecting natural habitats for other species, we ultimately protect ourselves. This is the gist of an inspiring speech that…