Latest updates on what's happening in RGE Group
At five years old, APRIL Group’s Fire Free Village Programme (FFVP) continues to show progress in fire prevention and managing fire-free landscapes. Piloted in 2014 and launched in 2015, the FFVP is a multi-stakeholder fire prevention project in Riau, Indonesia, founded in close collaboration with local communities and in partnership with NGOs, the government, police, military […]
On 26 July 2018, leading pulp and paper producer APRIL celebrated the fourth anniversary of its successful Fire-Free Village Programme (FFVP). An evolution of the Village Incentive Programme in 2014, the initiative seeks to engage communities as an on-the-ground approach to address the problem of fire and haze in Indonesia. The event was attended by various […]
![[Guest Blog] Reflections on Tanoto Foundation Scholars’ Project Sukacita: Empowerment & Gratitude](https://www.inside-rge.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/checkup-700x350.jpg)
Editor’s Note: This article is contributed by Desiree Tay, a Year 2 NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine student and a first-time Project Sukacita participant. When I first received the Tanoto Foundation Scholarship, I did not expect to find myself on a plane to Pangkalan Kerinci, Indonesia, some eight months later. As a new […]
As part of Asian Agri’s Fire-Free Village Programme (FFVP), 16 villages in Riau and Jambi, Indonesia have renewed their commitment to not use fire as a land management tool. Launched in 2016, FFVP aims to empower and encourage villages to adopt a zero tolerance to burning as an approach to clear land for agricultural and […]
APRIL’s Stakeholder Advisory Committee (SAC) published its progress report, providing a retrospective of its engagement with one of the largest, most technologically advanced and efficient makers of pulp and paper products in the world. Meeting for the first time in January 2014, the SAC operates as an independent body tasked with overseeing the implementation of APRIL’s […]
Endangered species have returned. Fires have been absent for almost three years. Communities have been engaged and their members, given alternative livelihoods. These are several of the highlights in Riau Ecosystem Restoration’s (RER) first annual report, released in April 2018. Guided by its pioneering approach of a four-phase model of peatland forest protection, creation and […]
On 20 March, ten students from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP), National University of Singapore (NUS) visited APRIL’s operations in Pangkalan Kerinci, Riau Province, Indonesia. The trip was part of the students’ class on “Moral Reasoning & the Policy Process”, a module on the challenges, justifications and implications of policy positions […]
A record 15 of 18 villages in APRIL’s Fire Free Village Program (FFVP) will receive the full award for not using fire as a tool in their approach to community land management in 2017, a significant milestone in their continuing journey towards fire resilience. Now on its third year, FFVP is a systematic and targeted approach […]
The Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP) featured APRIL in a case study entitled “A Production-Protection Model for Sustainable Pulp & Paper Operations in Riau, Indonesia”. It tells how APRIL “took steps to balance the economic and environmental concerns of paper production while taking into account multiple stakeholders, including the Indonesian government, local […]
Bird lovers rejoice! Restorasi Ekosistem Riau (RER)’s pioneering report, Birds of the Kampar Peninsula: An Annotated Checklist, has confirmed the presence of 299 rare and endangered birds in its Kampar Peninsula peatland restoration forest area in Indonesia. The annotated checklist records all the bird species that have been identified as of June 2017 and was […]