Main photo - Officers preparing land certificates to be awarded to residents at Tawaeli Sub-district Office, North Palu, Central Sulawesi, Friday (October 23, 2020). ANTARA PHOTO/Mohamad Hamzah/wsj).

• 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

• Fires have swept through large swaths of peatland forest in the western part of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island since the start of the year, an area that usually sees much smaller, controlled fires.
• Environmental activists say they suspect the fires might be linked to palm oil companies with plantations in and around the burned areas.

• A total of 17.6 million hectares (43.5 million acres) of Indigenous territories in Indonesia, an area half the size of Germany, have been demarcated under an independent initiative that began in 2010.

• Critics of the Indonesian government’s plan to build a new capital city in the coal-mining heartland of East Kalimantan province have long warned about the abandoned mining pits dotting the landscape.

• 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.

• For years, people have settled illegally in national parks around Indonesia, clearing the land and farming it in the hope they will eventually be granted legal title to it.

• The Indonesian government’s decision to revoke permits for plantation firms to operate in forest areas could lead to lawsuits filed by the companies, environmental law experts say.

• The Indonesian government has rejected a proposal made by a prominent university to reclassify oil palms as a forest crop.
• The proposal was ostensibly meant to resolve the problem of illegal plantations operating inside forest areas, and would have redefined plantations as forests, and new plantings as reforestation.