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The Palm Oil Innovation Group (POIG), as the group is known, unveiled its standards during the annual meeting of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the industry's main certification body. The standards build on criteria set by the RSPO by adding stricter requirements "to ensure that there is a supply of traceable palm oil free from forest and peatland destruction and human rights abuses," according to a statement from Greenpeace, one of POIG's charter members.  Read more at http://news.mongabay.com/2013/1118-poig-palm-oil.html#wlI8Y8ZEEyKQzKTU.99

Wilmar, the world's largest palm oil trader and a long-time target of environmentalists, has signed a landmark policy that commits the company to eliminate deforestation from its supply chain. Read more at http://news.mongabay.com/2013/1205-wilmar-zero-deforestation.html#I1BBsX02RqbVmSSf.99

A hedge fund manager has downgraded Lumber Liquidators' stock over the company's alleged links to illegal logging in the Russian Far East Read more at http://news.mongabay.com/2013/1202-lumber-liquidators-stock-illegal-logging.html#0g9VRO8vX0tA1BP8.99

A businessman whose company kidnapped and violently assaulted environmentalists investigating illegal logging in a national park is set to earn millions of dollars from Thursday's initial public offering of Sawit Sumbermas Sarana, a palm oil company with holdings in Indonesian Borneo. Read more at http://news.mongabay.com/2013/1211-ssms-ipo.html#UUOhVkZxx6UTk8Rp.99

The world's largest publishing companies have adopted policies that significantly curtail use of paper sourced from rainforest destruction and social conflict, finds a new assessment published by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).  Read more at http://news.mongabay.com/2014/0518-ran-publishing-industry.html#20O30qvTrE8O6zAr.99

The potential for new laws governing the use of forest resources this year in Cameroon promises an opportunity to stem the rapid loss of forest in the biologically diverse country. But the changes may ultimately not be what's needed to save Cameroon's forests. Read more at http://news.mongabay.com/2014/0625-gfrn-cannon-cameroon.html#w6L2jPe1cgOgqGYr.99

According to new data, tropical countries lost 158,000 square kilometers (39 million acres) of tree cover in 2017 - an area the size of Bangladesh.

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.

Indonesia has reported a second straight year of declining deforestation, and credited more stringent land management policies for the trend. However, the government's insistence on counting pulpwood plantations as reforested areas has once again sparked controversy over how the very concept of a forest should be defined.

Research published in the American Journal of Primatology earlier this month finds that the overall Western Chimpanzee population declined by six percent annually between 1990 and 2014, a total decline of 80.2 percent. The main threats to the Western Chimpanzee are almost all man-made. Habitat loss and fragmentation driven by slash-and-burn agriculture, industrial agriculture (including deforestation for oil palm plantations as well as eucalyptus, rubber, and sugar cane developments), and extractive industries like logging, mining, and oil top the list. In response to the finding that the Western Chimpanzee population has dropped so precipitously in less than three decades, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) elevated the subspecies' status to Critically Endangered on its Red List of Threatened Species.

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.

An estimated 50 to 80 percent of southern wetland forest is now gone, and that which remains provides ecosystem services totaling $500 billion as well as important wildlife habitat. Logging is considered one of the biggest threats to the 35 million acres of remaining wetland forest in the southern U.S., and conservation organizations are saying this threat is coming largely from the wood pellet biomass industry.

British fast food restaurants and grocery chains, including Tesco, Morrisons and McDonald's, buy their chicken from Cargill, which feeds its poultry with imported soy, much of it apparently coming from the Bolivian Amazon and Brazilian Cerrado - areas rapidly being deforested for new soy plantations.

While national leaders spout optimistic platitudes celebrating the great achievement of the globally unifying Paris Agreement on climate, environmentalists note that there is little in the way of substantial action plans behind the many promises made last December. Meanwhile, the most intense El Niño in history is leaving in its wake a world gripped by 7 months of record high temperatures; drought, water shortages, and famine (especially in India and Africa); wildfires (Fort McMurray, Canada); record coral bleaching; and a fast shrinking Arctic ice cap that set stunning early melt records this winter and spring.

Due to skyrocketing consumer demand, particularly from Asia, today's wildlife traffickers have the resources to outfit their henchmen with weaponry and equipment that often outmatches that of the local park rangers. The poachers doing the most damage in Africa today are employed by professional trafficking syndicates, and they enjoy a level of support and financial backing unimaginable during earlier poaching crises. The poachers' arsenal includes the expanding use of military-grade equipment like helicopters, machine guns, infrared scopes, and heavy armored vehicles.

Deforestation in the world's largest rainforest jumped 29 percent over last year, representing a sharp increase over the historically low deforestation rate seen just five years ago and the highest level recorded in the region since 2008, reports the Brazilian government. The numbers, released by Brazil's National Space Research Institute INPE on Monday, show that 7,989 square kilometers of rainforest were destroyed between August 2015 and July 2016. The loss is equivalent to an area 135 times the size of Manhattan or the combined land mass of the American states of Connecticut and Delaware.

Gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans - our great ape cousins teeter on the precipice of extinction. And it's not much of a secret that we humans have had a lot to do with putting them there. But what about the other primates? The news isn't much better, it turns out. According to a new study, 60 percent of primates - including drills and gibbons, lemurs and tarsiers, bush babies and spider monkeys - face the threat of extinction. Even those not in immediate danger of dying out are at risk, as the numbers of three-quarters of all primate species are trending downward.

While 2016 lacked the drama of Indonesia's 2015 fire and haze crisis, surging deforestation in Earth's largest rainforest and ongoing destruction of forests for industrial plantations meant that it was far from a quiet year for the planet's rainforests. So what's ahead for 2017? Here are eight things we'll be closely watching in the new year.

A Brazilian Senate Commission is quickly, and surreptitiously, moving forward a constitutional amendment (PEC 65) that would end the need for environmental assessment approvals for public works projects in Brazil ranging from Amazon dams to roads and canals, and oil infrastructure.

The last Sumatran rhinoceros in the Malaysian wild has died, the latest grim milestone for a species on the brink of extinction. No more than 100 of the creatures are thought to remain in the forests of Indonesia, with nine more in captivity across Indonesia, Malaysia and the U.S.