Urgency
Malaysian palm oil grower loses case over damages to rainforest community
IOI group suffered a
legal setback this week when the Miri High Court — a court for Miri
District in Sarawak, a state in Malaysian Borneo — ruled that the palm
oil grower is liable for damages caused by the destruction of land
belonging to Long Teran Kanan, a Kayan native community. The legal
battle has dragged on for 12-years but now represents an important
precedent for forest-dependent communities in Malaysia, reports the
Bruno Manser Fund, an NGO that campaigns on behalf of Sarawak's forest
people.
According to the Borneo Resources Institute Malaysia (BRIMAS), Senior
Assistant Registrar of the Miri High Court, Abdul Raafidin bin Majidi on
behalf of Justice Datuk Abdul Aziz bin Adul Rahim, ruled that members
of the village of Long Teran Kanan possess native customary rights over
land that had been granted to IOI by the Sarawak state government. The
court said the leases had been issued unconstitutionally and were
therefore "null and void."
Gorillas in the list: New extinction fears for central African gorillas
Illegal logging, the bushmeat trade, mining, the charcoal
trade and a new strain of the Ebola
virus could drive gorillas into extinction in central Africa in as
little as 15 years, according to a new report from the U.N. and
Interpol.
Three of the four gorilla subspecies are already considered critically endangered, and the fourth is listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Previous assessments by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) predicted that only 10 percent of gorilla habitat would remain undisturbed by 2032. UNEP now says that date was overly optimistic, and gorillas could lose their habitat entirely in as little as a decade. The danger to gorillas is "especially critical in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)," according to the report, due to ongoing conflicts and roaming militias, which are responsible for much for the illegal trade in the area.
Plan to chop down forests in England
The new policy to convert forests to 'open habitat' will increase the area of heathland across England by 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres) every year for at least the next five years.
This will mean chopping down thousands of hectares of mostly commercial conifers to allow rare animals like sand lizards, adder, woodlark and curlew to return.
It is estimated that 80 per cent of lowland heathland has been lost in the past 200 years to plantation forestry, agriculture and housing development.
The Department for the Environment and Forestry Commission policy for 'Restoration of Open Habitats from Woods and Forests' is designed to return much of the land taken by commercial forestry to wildlife.
Depopulation may be harming the Amazon rainforest
Urbanization may be having unexpected impacts in the Amazon rainforest by leaving forest areas vulnerable to exploitation by outsiders, report researchers writing in Conservation Letters.
Conducting field surveys during the course of 10,000-kilometers of travel along remote Amazon rivers, Luke Parry of Lancaster University found that a sharp decrease in rural habitation has not been accompanied by a decline in harvesting of wildlife and forest resources, indicating that urban populations exact a heavy toll on distant forests through hunting, fishing, logging, and harvesting of non-timber forest products.
How Much Rainforest Is Destroyed Each Day?
Dear EarthTalk: Do you have current facts and figures about how much rainforest is being destroyed each day around the world, and for what purpose(s)?
Pinning down exact numbers is nearly impossible, but most experts agree that we are losing upwards of 80,000 acres of tropical rainforest daily, and significantly degrading another 80,000 acres every day on top of that. Along with this loss and degradation, we are losing some 135 plant, animal and insect species every day—or some 50,000 species a year—as the forests fall.
