February 2012 Blog Posts (6)

While some people are finding new ways to make withdrawals from nature’s bank, for others conservation has come along and created credit limits to long-held livelihoods.  It’s a tough job to balance these two faces of a coin that no-one is quite sure how to count.

Read the rest of this post at Under the…

I would like to invite you to participate in the World Wide Views (WWViews) on Biodiversity process. WWViews on Biodiversity wants to address and discuss the challenges that impede the safeguarding of biodiversity. 

WWViews on Biodiversity is an ambitious, global citizen participation project on global biodiversity policies and actions. The project is coordinated by the Danish Board of Technology, with support from Biofaction (Markus…

During the 2011 United Nation Framework Convention on Climate(UNFCCC), the UNDP sponsored five African journalists to travel with a caravan of youths who were demanding for climate justice for the Africa continent. The Youths who were about 160, were from across Africa, Europe and Asia.The journalists traveled with the caravan from Kenya through to Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana and South Africa by road,in six trucks as they created awareness about climate change and held concerts in the…

“Boleh makan… Boleh… Boleh.” As I turned the pages of my copy of Mammals of Borneo to reveal more images of wildlife, Siba anak Aji said the same thing each time. “Can eat… Can… Can.”

It was 1998 and I was doing ecological research in Lambir Hills National Park in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Siba, my research assistant, was explaining which of the wild species his Iban…

Who’s that hiding in the trees? It’s a Bornean orangutan, an ape with an unhappy history and an uncertain future.

I saw this orangutan and several others when I took a recent boat journey past Kaja Island in the Rungan River of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.

The 40-plus orangutans on the island are ‘rehabs’ — creatures that have been confiscated from poachers, found orphaned or rescued from homes where as pets they were subjected to a diet of noodles…