Protecting the environment with intelligence
Australia’s Parliament has today (November 19, 2012) voted in new legislation banning stolen timber from its markets. The new laws were five years in the making and require all importers to carry out mandatory due diligence on timber and timber products sourced from overseas. Penalties for those found guilty of importing illegal logged timber include [...]
International body’s credibility called into question LONDON: The credibility of the international Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has been called into question over its failure to act against a company bulldozing ancestral forests and perpetrating human rights abuses in Indonesia. First Resources Ltd has submitted documents to the RSPO falsely claiming that its subsidiary [...]
Last month, the President of Indonesia did the international investment equivalent of, shall we say, showing a bit of leg in the US. At an event specially organised at the New York Stock Exchange, in Wall Street, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono boasted to the assembled businessmen of the abundant natural resources on offer to potential investors. [...]
LONDON: The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) is calling for supporters world-wide to demand an end to the intimidation of an indigenous community in East Kalimantan and the destruction of its customary forests by plantation firms. Two companies are clearing forests and farmland belonging to the Dayak Benuaq of Muara Tae, in Indonesian Borneo, while the [...]
The international community is finally recognising that environmental crime is not some small-scale criminal activity taking place deep in the jungles of Africa or Asia but is serious, growing, transnational and, shockingly, highly organised through the involvement of notorious criminal syndicates and terrorist groups. This week, during the ongoing 67th session of the UN General [...]
LONDON: More than a year after being exposed as major players in the smuggling of timber from Laos, a new report reveals the Vietnamese timber industry, the military and well-connected Lao actors are still profiting from the flow of logs into Vietnam. As well as the role played by a commercial operation of the Vietnam [...]