Deforestation

By Environmental Investigation Agency MUARE TAE, Indonesia – The fate of a Dayak community deep in the interior of East Kalimantan demonstrates how Indonesia must safeguard the rights of indigenous people who practise a sustainable lifestyle if it is to meet ambitious targets to reduce emissions from deforestation, alleges an organisation that specialises in investigating environmental crimes. The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) claim Dayak Benuaq of Muara Tae, in West Kutai Kabupaten, today face a two-pronged assault from palm oil companies aggressively expanding into their ancestral forests. Together with Indonesian NGO Telapak, the community is manning a forest outpost around the clock in a last ditch attempt to save it from destruction. ...

By Steve Pedery, Oregon Wild Oregon Wild, the state’s leading public lands and wildlife conservation organization, today voiced strong opposition to H.R. 4019, the “Federal Forests County Revenue, Schools, and Jobs Act of 2012”. The bill, which received a hearing in Congress this morning, would legally mandate that the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) log no less than 33.2 billion board feet per year—15 times greater than 2010 levels—to generate funds to support county budgets. ...

By Tom Phillips / The Guardian A single shot to the temple was Mouth Organ John’s reward for spilling the beans. His friend, Junior José Guerra, fared only marginally better. Guerra’s prize for speaking out against the illegal loggers laying waste to the greatest tropical rainforest on Earth? A broken home, two petrified children and an uncertain exile from a life he had spent years building in the Brazilian Amazon. ...

By Mongabay Global forest cover, as well as forest loss, is lower than previously estimated by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), according to a new satellite-based assessment that replaces the self-reporting system previously used by the U.N. agency. The survey found the world’s total forest cover amounted to 3.69 billion hectares, or roughly 30 percent of global land area, in 2005. FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010 (FRA 2010) — which was based on the old system — put total forest cover at 4.06 billion hectares. ...