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By Jeremy Hance A court in Indonesia has sentenced a man to 12 years in prison for poaching six critically endangered Javan rhinos, in what’s been hailed as the harshest punishment handed down for wildlife crime to date. Poaching carries a maximum sentence of five years under Indonesian law, and prosecutors had sought this figure in the case against Sunendi, 32, along with a 10 million rupiah ($616) fine. However, the defendant also faced additional charges of theft and of illegal firearm possession, the latter of which carries a maximum penalty of death. The presiding judge in the case, Joni ...
Mongabay
By Hans Nicholas Jong JAKARTA — In 2015, Indonesian forestry giant Asia Pulp & Paper announced it would retire thousands of hectares of its commercial timber plantation in Sumatra, with the ultimate goal of restoring the land back to the tropical peat swamp it once was. The ambitious project marked a notable shift in the forest management practices of APP, which had been heavily criticized in the past for draining and clearing large swaths of carbon-rich peat forests to plant the acacia trees from which paper, packaging and many other consumer products are made. Central to APP’s effort was rew...
Mongabay
By Maxwell Radwin Honduras is preparing the construction of a maximum-security prison to address the country’s ongoing security crisis, which continues to suffer from widespread gang violence. But the prison happens to be located on a remote Caribbean island designated as a protected area, and conservationists say the project could destroy its ecosystem. The prison could threaten the uninhabited Islas del Cisne (Swan Islands), an archipelago recognized as a national marine park. Because the three-island archipelago is so far from mainland Honduras — approximately 250 kilometers (155 miles) awa...
Mongabay
By Mongabay Last December, the Mexican government opened part of its ambitious Tren Maya project, a railway line connecting the tourist hubs of Cancún and Tulum with the rest of the Yucatán Peninsula. However, the project has proven controversial because construction has resulted in deforestation, the relocation of Indigenous communities, and the destruction of cave ecosystems. Mongabay reporter Maxwell Radwin decided to get on the train and experience it while searching for lasting environmental damage. He went down to Cancún during Holy Week, a peak travel period, and found the train station...
Mongabay
By Liz Kimbrough Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air and store it in their leaves, stems, roots and the soil. But as climate change and human activities drive more plant species toward extinction, that stored carbon could be released back into the atmosphere, potentially accelerating climate change. A new study published in Nature Communications suggests this biodiversity-driven carbon loss may be a major overlooked source of future emissions. The researchers used computer modeling to estimate that losing plant diversity around the world could release between 7 billion and 146 billion me...
Mongabay
By Keona Blanks For generations, native Hawaiians have understood that their aquaculture systems, fishponds known as loko i‘a, serve as nurseries that seed fish populations in surrounding waters. For the first time, a team of scientists from the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) have modeled this feat of Indigenous science in a study. “We are using science to translate ‘ike kupuna, or Indigenous knowledge, into policy,” said study co-author Kawika Winter, an ecologist at HIMB and He‘eia National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR). “The value of this paper is that it’s one of the first,...
Mongabay
By Fathul RakhmanWahyu Chandra TAKALAR/EAST LOMBOK/JAKARTA, Indonesia — Mustam Daeng Beta exhaled slowly before he began describing his time as a young fisherman many years ago. “Fish bombing was regular, also using poison,” Daeng Beta told Mongabay Indonesia in an interview on April 22 at his home in the village of Tompotana in Indonesia’s Takalar district, South Sulawesi province. “[We] never got caught, maybe because my boss had the backing from a certain side. But that was a very long time ago.” On the island of Lombok, some 800 kilometers (500 miles) southwest of Takalar, across the Flore...
Mongabay
By Hans Nicholas Jong JAKARTA — A dispute simmering for years has erupted into conflict between villagers and a palm oil company on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi over the latter’s failure to abide by a profit-sharing scheme. At least nine villagers in Buol district and one worker from plantation company PT Hardaya Inti Plantations (HIP) were injured in clashes on May 7 and 10 that began as protests. The villagers had since the start of the year formally objected to HIP harvesting palm fruit from the trees that the company was cultivating on the villagers’ land, noting that they hadn’t been...
Mongabay
By Katarina Zimmer In 2021, a group of scientists in Ecuador looked in disbelief at a photo of a chocolate-colored frog with an orange belly. The researchers wondered: Could it be Atelopus guanujo — the Guanujo stubfoot toad — a species of harlequin frog that hadn’t been seen since 1988 and thought to be extinct? At first, “you can’t really believe that you’re looking at a lost species!” said conservation biologist Andrea Terán-Valdez, a research team member from the Jambatu Center for Amphibian Research and Conservation in San Rafael. A. guanujo, once abundant across Ecuador’s central Andes M...
Mongabay
By Andy BallGerald FlynnVutha Srey This is the second part of a Mongabay series about challenges faced by Cambodia’s small-scale fishers along the coast. Read Part One. KOH KONG & PREAH SIHANOUK, Cambodia — By 11 a.m., the sun was already beating down on Daem Thkov. The chatter of tourists on the nearby beach floated on the gentle sea breeze through the fishing village on the Cambodian island of Koh Rong. But behind the tranquil scenes of turquoise waters, white sands and morning cocktails, an uncertainty has gripped those who call Daem Thkov home. What the tourists sipping cocktails on the be...
Mongabay
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