Civil society groups in Southeast Asia are calling for greater public participation and transparency in the drafting process of a regional declaration on environmental rights, as well as stronger levels of commitment from states within the final agreement. First tabled in 2021 by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the bloc’s declaration on environmental rights, known as ADER, aims to provide an unprecedented regional framework to push for the implementation of international environmental rights standards. These include the 2022 U.N. General Assembly declaration of ac ..read more

The Pan Amazon is a significant source of several key industrial commodities. Global markets are not overly dependent on the region; nonetheless, production from Amazonian mines is not insignificant. Development of mineral resources is a decades-long process and, if the extractive sector were to abandon the region, as proposed by some environmental advocates, the global economy would find other geographies to supply these essential minerals. Oil and gas production is insignificant at the global scale (< 0.1%) and production could be wound down without difficulty. In purely financial terms ..read more

Plastic is a remarkably versatile and durable material, which has made it indispensable in almost every area of modern life. But these same properties, amplified by our “take-make-waste” linear economy, have created a brewing environmental catastrophe. It’s hard to grasp the gigantic scale of our global plastic waste problem. Since 1950, humanity has produced more than 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic. Most has ended up in landfills or the environment, where it is harmful to wildlife, ecosystem functioning and human health. Once in the environment, plastic slowly breaks down into smaller and ..read more

Small fragments of ancestral Amazonian culture are emerging from the ground in the backyards of homes in the rural and urban parts of Parintins, Amazonas: pieces of broken pots, chips with clear drawings, elaborately sculpted figures of human and nonhuman beings, decorative objects and burial urns — all made of pottery. Among these particles of time that include stone instruments as well, people and objects are intertwined amid diverse landscapes composing an ancient biocultural mosaic called a sustainable agroecological system in archaeology. In this municipality located on Tupinambarana Isla ..read more

The Narwhal is an award-winning, non-profit, environmental news outlet based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. It was co-founded in 2018 by podcast guest Emma Gilchrist, who joins the show to discuss the array of environmental issues they cover and how they feature Indigenous views and topics via a “story telling vs. story taking” point of view. Her news organization recently advanced one of the most potentially significant efforts for press freedom in Canada, when it made the decision to sue the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for arresting and detaining their journalist Amber Br ..read more

On April 17, 2020, an Indigenous leader who fought to protect his ancestral land was violently killed in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. Almost exactly four years later, a local bar owner has been convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison for Ari Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau’s murder. The ruling marks a rare case of justice for violence against Indigenous land defenders, even as conflicts over traditional territories in Brazil persist. On April 15 this year, a court in Rondônia convicted João Carlos da Silva for double aggravated homicide of the Indigenous land defender and teacher — meaning the murder ..read more

Hopes for a worldwide plastics treaty gained some momentum at the fourth of five scheduled summits to hash out an agreement. But while the week-long session of the UN International Negotiating Committee made some headway, it didn’t leave environmentalists feeling overly optimistic. INC-4, which took place the last week of April in Ottawa, Canada, was the latest step in a United Nations effort to develop international law to control plastic pollution. Representatives of 170 nations converged on Ottawa, where they greatly shortened a lengthy draft text, and reached consensus on the need for inte ..read more

If you’re in the United States, your meal might come with a side of deforestation.  The US imported palm oil, cattle products, soybeans, cocoa, rubber, coffee and corn linked to an estimated 122,800 hectares (303,445 acres) of tropical deforestation between October 2021 and November 2023 — an area the size of the city of Los Angeles, according to a new report provided by the NGO Trase for Global Witness. More than a third (33.8%) of the deforestation was linked to oil palm imports, primarily from Indonesia. Cattle products, sourced mainly from Brazil, Australia and Mexico, were the second ..read more

JAKARTA — Fear among Indonesia’s ruling class of losing control of natural resources to Indigenous people is why the country’s parliament continues to delay passing a long-awaited bill on Indigenous rights, according to activists. The bill was proposed in 2012 and has been placed on parliament’s list of national priority legislation every year since 2014, but never passed since. A lawmaker on the legislation committee discussing the bill now says that’s because it keeps being blocked by two of the biggest parties in parliament. Luluk Nur Hamidah said her committee had as early as 2020 submitte ..read more

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government is resuming a controversial policy of exporting lobster larvae — the latest chapter in an eight-year saga that began over concerns for wild lobster stocks and led to a fisheries minister being jailed for corruption. The country’s current fisheries minister, Sakti Wahyu Trenggono, said recently that the decision to reinstate the export policy was to capitalize on the global multimillion-dollar lobster trade. The government initially banned exports of lobster larvae in 2016 to prevent the overharvesting of wild stocks from the country’s rich waters. For now, e ..read more