TANGGAMUS, Indonesia — When Sri Atmiatun arrived in the hills of the Batutegi region in southern Sumatra’s Lampung province in 2017, the coffee trees were already there, overgrown and neglected, slowly fading back into scrub. Her uncle had asked her to take over the plot. Sri agreed, trading years of labor on oil palm plantations in the central Sumatran province of Riau. Nearly a decade later, she still walks the same uphill path each morning. Now 45, Sri manages more than 3 hectares (7.4 acres) of land within the 1,400-hectare (3,460-acre) Sumber Makmur social forestry area. Sumber Makmur itself sits on the edge of the more than 80,000-hectare (198,000-acre) Batutegi forest landscape, where some areas are strictly protected while others are managed by communities through agroforestry systems. Under the social forestry program, the land remains state-owned, but local communities like Sri’s are granted the right to manage it for their livelihoods under rules designed to protect the forest and its ecological functions. “I stayed because this land feeds us,” Sri told Mongabay in early March. “If I leave, who will take care of it?” Sri’s story reflects a broader shift. Across the Batutegi landscape, land that was once cleared for coffee is now being restored and managed under Indonesia’s social forestry program. Legal recognition has given farmers access to support and training from the government and private organizations. In return, forest clearing and expansion into protected core areas have been reduced, allowing the forest to remain a safe habitat for…This article was originally published on Mongabay

BANGKOK — More than 600 residents of Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai provinces embarked May 31 on a roughly 68-kilometer, six-day ‘peace walk’ to demand the Thai government take action on the river pollution crisis that has seen Thai rivers polluted with heavy metals. The ensemble of affected residents, civil society groups, monks and students marched from Tha Ton subdistrict in Chiang Mai to the city of Chiang Rai in northern Thailand, reaching their destination on June 5, World Environment Day. For more than a year, Thailand’s Pollution Control Department has reported dangerous levels of arsenic, mercury, cadmium and other heavy metals in rivers across northern Thailand, with mining operations across eastern Myanmar suspected to be responsible for the pollution. “We are walking because our rivers are slowly dying,” Pianporn Deetes, executive director of the Rivers and Rights Foundation, which helped to organize the peace walk, told Mongabay by phone. “Toxic contamination from unregulated mining upstream is already affecting water, fish, food, livelihoods, and public health. We do not want to wait until more people become sick. This is an emergency.” Pianporn said the walk (42 miles) was about taking collective action to share information, document impacts and build public pressure in a bid to force the government to address the issue, which Pianporn said has, so far, been lacking. “Monitoring has improved, but action has not matched the scale of the crisis,” she said. “We need urgent diplomatic engagement with neighboring countries, stronger health monitoring, transparency, and action to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

BANGKOK — Seven hundred days after activists from the environmental group Mother Nature Cambodia were imprisoned on charges widely regarded as retaliatory for their activism, 73 international and Cambodian civil society organizations have renewed calls for their unconditional release. After a trial lasting just over a month, 10 activists from Mother Nature Cambodia were sentenced on July 2, 2024, to between six and eight years in prison. Only five of the defendants attended the hearings, which saw Long Kuntha, 28, Ly Chandaravuth, 26, Phuon Keoraksmey, 25, and Thun Ratha, 34, each sentenced to six years behind bars for plotting against the government; fellow activist Yim Leanghy, 36, received an eight-year sentence for both plotting against the government and insulting the king. The five activists who did not attend the trial were sentenced in absentia. The appeals hearing for all 10 convicted activists was slated to take place on June 2, but has been postponed indefinitely by the Phnom Penh Court of Appeals. “The MNC5 are incarcerated in prisons in overcrowded and harsh living conditions, separated from each other and spread out all across Cambodia, hundreds of kilometers away from their families and legal counsel,” wrote the 73 NGOs in an open letter addressed to Prime Minister Hun Manet. “The … NGOs who have signed this letter sincerely request you take immediate action to ensure the unjust convictions of these five activists are reversed either prior to or at their upcoming appeals court hearing in Phnom Penh, and that their freedom…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Sat Born, 56, recalls freezing at the forest’s entrance when he first saw it. “Its head was this big,” he says, wide-eyed, spreading his hands to show the animal’s size. Recollecting that eventful morning in 2001, Born, who now farms bananas and durians, retraces his steps from his home in Trapeang Chheu Trav village in the rainforests of the Cardamom Mountains in southwestern Cambodia. As he walks up a hill rising above the forest canopy, he points to a spot on the road. “It’s over here. When I saw the tiger, it was 9 a.m.,” he says. “I was really shocked … I couldn’t tell if the tiger was coming towards me.” In 2007, just six years after this fleeting encounter, Cambodia’s last confirmed tiger sighting was logged by a camera trap. In the 1990s, the country was estimated to host hundreds of wild Indochinese tigers, but decades of poaching pressure took a heavy toll. In 2016, tigers (Panthera tigris) were formally declared extinct in Cambodia. That may be set to change with the imminent translocation of a small population of Bengal tigers from India. Although many reintroductions are success stories, this one raises some serious concerns. Why would Cambodia bring in a nonnative tiger? Have the people living in these areas been adequately consulted? Will these translocated tigers be able to adapt to this new habitat? Is there enough prey to sustain them, and if not, how will the government address predation when hungry cats feed on livestock? With…This article was originally published on Mongabay