• The Harita Group holds a nickel mining concession covering about 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) on Wawonii Island.
• The arrival of the mine has divided the community between those who support the development and farmers hoping to retain their fruit and nut trees.
• One man described his grief as the grave of his son was exhumed and moved as a result of the mine.

WAWONII ISLAND, Indonesia — The coconut palm has been a source of food and identity for centuries among the people of Wawonii Island.

• Singapore has launched a reforestation campaign after losing huge amounts of mangrove habitats in the past century.

• It plans to plant 1 million trees within 10 years to improve living conditions for wildlife and people.

• The scheme began in March 2020 and had led to the planting of 51,819 trees by October 2021.

• One goal of the project is to have all Singaporean households approximately a 10-minute walk from a park.

The National Assembly (NA) on June 24 adopted the Forest and Nature Conservation Bill of Bhutan 2021 with 38 ‘Yes’, and two “ No” votes and two abstained.

Chairperson of the Environment and Climate Change Committee, Gyem Dorji, said that the Act, which was enacted in 1995, was not amended for more than two decades.

“During these years, the forest department was guided by executive orders and notifications, which were incorporated into rules, regulations, and guidelines,” he said.

• Much of the landscape of Indonesia’s East Kalimantan province has been transformed, its formerly vast forests razed for logging, monocrop agriculture and open-cast coal mining.
• A recently published study analyzes how waves of extractive industries have affected the inhabitants of one village in the province
• The cumulative impacts of these industries were found to be severe, but also to vary depending on multiple factors including ethnicity, gender, wealth and age.

• A new report identifies the main threats to biodiversity in Sri Lanka — river diversion, habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, overexploitation, and climate change — as well as updates the catalog of the island’s wealth of plant and animal life.
• The 6th National Report to the Convention on Biological Diversity is the most comprehensive analysis yet of the country’s biodiversity, with more than 100 experts from different fields contributing to the effort.
• It identifies five protected area clusters and recommends systematic interventions to li

(main photo: In this file photo a farmer holds a handful of soil parched because of drought in Tunisia's east-central area of Kairouan, on 20 October, 2021. AFP Photo)

Human activities are damaging and degrading the lands of the Earth in an unsustainable fashion according to a new United Nations (UN) report.

Up to 40 percent of the global terrain has already been devalued, mainly through modern agriculture.

• On March 27, Nepali authorities evicted about 100 members of the Indigenous Chepang community living in Chitwan National Park and set fire to their huts.
• They allege the community members are encroaching on national park land, famous for its rhinos and tigers, and building new settlements despite warnings and resettlement plans rolled out by the government.
• However, community members say that only providing shelter, and not land for subsistence farming and their traditional livelihoods, does not solve the community’s problems.
• S

• A subsidiary of South Korean paper company Moorim has cleared natural forests a tenth the size of Seoul in Indonesia’s Papua region over the past six years, a new report alleges.
• The report, published by various NGOs, alleges that the cleared areas consisted of primary forests serving as a habitat for threatened species and a source of livelihood for Indigenous Papuans.

Felipe “Pipe” Henao is a young environmentalist from the small town of Calamar in southeastern Colombia. At the meeting point of the Amazon and Orinoco basins, it’s an area of abundant biodiversity and an important biological corridor to the Andes mountains.

The forest region was once only occupied by a few nomadic Indigenous communities, but has since seen waves of colonization and conflict, rubber and coca booms, FARC rebel occupation, and most recently, rampant deforestation.