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Colombia is the latest country to join the Cocoa and Forests Initiative, which aims to create a global movement for deforestation-free cocoa.

Colombia's supreme court granted protections, filed by 25 children and other young people, that affirm that deforestation in the Colombian Amazon violates their rights to health and life. In the ruling, the supreme court ordered the president of Colombia and environmental authorities to create an action plan to protect this important natural area.

PepsiCo has announced it will restore and protect a handful of watersheds in Latin American countries in which it operates, including Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Guatemala. The company announced plans to "replenish" all the water used during manufacturing in high water risk areas by returning it to the watershed from which it was taken.

Martin von Hildebrand, founder of the Fundacion Gaia Amazonas, is working to establish an ecological corridor protecting 333 million acres of rain forest stretching from Colombia to the Brazilian coast. That will involve finding ways to work with the loggers, miners and farmers already active in the area, he says. "We have to look at those areas where there already is something like oil, or like agriculture, or like cattle ranching and approach it from a sustainable point of view," he explains. 

A new study calculates that the island of Borneo lost nearly 150,000 orangutans in the period between 1999 and 2015, largely as a result of deforestation and killing. There were an estimated 104,700 of the critically endangered apes left as of 2012. The study also warns that another 45,000 orangutans are doomed by 2050 under the business-as-usual scenario, where forests are cleared for logging, palm oil, mining and pulpwood leases. Orangutans are also disappearing from intact forests, most likely being killed, the researchers say.