Palm oil producers and environmental activists alike have expressed dismay at a move by European officials to phase out palm-oil based biofuel by 2030. Officials in Indonesia and Malaysia - who together produce 85% of palm oil globally - say the move is discriminatory and have vowed a vigorous response, including lobbying EU member states, bringing the matter before the World Trade Organisation, and imposing retaliatory measures on EU goods.
Environmental activists, on the other hand, say the policy does not go far enough leaving loopholes allowing palm oil to be treated as a renewable fuel, allowing continued expansion of palm plantations into peat forests. They also criticize the policy’s failure to label soybean oil as high risk, with growing evidence that soy cultivation may have greater deforestation risks than palm oil.

The Norwegian parliament voted to make Norway the world's first country to ban its biofuel industry from importing deforestation-linked palm oil starting in 2020. A 2017 report by Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN) showed palm oil-based biofuels have a more detrimental effect on climate change than using fossil fuels. The resolution calls on the government "to formulate a comprehensive proposal for policies and taxes in the biofuels policy in order to exclude biofuels with high deforestation risk."

The Draft National Forest Policy 2018 is now open for public comments, and will replace the older 1988 policy once it comes into force. Critics are apprehensive about how the draft policy deals with community participation and industrial forestry. The current draft is bereft of knowledge-driven solutions, some experts say.

The yearlong ban on logging across all of Myanmar since April 2016 was lifted at the end of March 2017, and now the Myanmar government says it is on its way to bringing verifiably legal timber to the international market. Although a number of illegal activities were prevented by the government, illegal logging continued during the ban due to insufficiently collaboration. International buyers and local NGOs are concerned that Myanmar is not doing enough to keep its forests safe.

In November 2016 WWF Indonesia suspended its membership of APRIL's Stakeholder Advisory Committee because of a lack of progress implementing their sustainable forest management plan, failing to abide by government policy on peatland protection, and a lack of transparency on business operations.

WWF have called on APRIL to have independent, third party verification on their progress with the forest management plan, as well as filling policy gaps to address deforestation in High Conservation Value forest and High Carbon Stock forest, as well as social issues and peat development.

According to the new report released by The international policy organization (Interpol), corruption in the forestry sector globally costs about $29 billion annually, with bribery as the most common form. The study finds that the forestry sector is particularly vulnerable to corruption as many forests since many forests are located in placed where governance and regulatory regimes are poor. Also, the point when corruption occurs most frequently is at the harvest, identified in another study Interpol collaborated with TREES project. Recommendations including policy and legislative reforms, capacity building, financial investigations, and Interpol anti-corruption investigators were provided to reduce the risk of corruption in forestry operations.

Gender inequality is still widespread in the forestry industry and existing roles for women are poorly supported by current forestry policy. The current issues for gender equality are the widespread misconceptions that forestry work is too physical or the environment is too dangerous for women to work in, and also a significant lack of gender-balanced and women-friendly policies in developing countries. Learning from developed countries where affirmative action in offering education, training, and childcare to working women is a suggested way to bring gender equality to forestry. Recently, FSC released a Guidance Document on Promoting Gender Equality in National Forest Stewardship Standards.

A new research published by the journal Conservation Letters studies the industrial palm oil plantations and regional greenhouse gas emissions levels. The paper summarizes the results of a case study focused on an oil palm operation in Gabon, and suggests that tropical African countries could largely offset the emissions created by converting the land to palm oil plantations if they enact mandatory policies regulation which forests can be cleared and how much remaining forest must be set aside for conservation. If those mandatory measures are lack, unsustainable levels of climate-warming carbon emissions could be created by converting Africa’s tropical forests into monoculture palm plantations.

The Norwegian parliament have announced that their public procurement policy will be going deforestation-free. Norway is recognised as a leader in funding forest conservation around the world and are now the first country to commit to zero deforestation. Nils Hermann Ranum form the Rainforest Foundation Norway commended the pledge and acknowledged it as a victory in the fight to protect rainforests.

According to satellite data analysed by researchers at Michigan State University, tree cover increased significantly on about 1.6% of China’s territory between 2000 and 2010, while tree cover dropped on only 0.38% of China’s land. The researchers attributed the forest gain to China’s Natural Forest Conservation Program, which has banned logging in many of the country’s forests and set up systems to prosecute illegal logging. The NFCP also compensates businesses and households for monitoring forest health and conserving trees rather than cutting them down.

China is planning to ban commercial logging in all natural forests by the end of 2016. This is an extension of a program which commenced in 1998 with a purpose to allow forests to recover from decades of over-logging and to help restore forest ecosystems and their resilience. This brief explores some of the anticipated economic and ecological implications of the forthcoming expansion of restrictions on commercial logging in China’s natural forests.

A group of scientists questioned whether sustainable forest management (SFM) is an effective way as commonly believed to protect tropical forests and the habitat and carbon reserves. They published a study in the journal Land Use Policy arguing that SFM may not actually lead to less deforestation based on the their analysis of timber concessions in the Central African nation of the Republic of Congo. According to their research, timber concessions operating under forest management plans (FMPs) showed higher rates of deforestation than concessions without them. The research was criticized by some scientists as overly simplistic. One of the authors was hesitant to extend the findings beyond the borders of the Republic of Congo.

The Indonesian Trade Ministry has defended its stance on a revised regulation annulling the timber legality verification system (SVLK) requirement for exporting 15 downstream products of timber, saying that exporters are still obliged to show proof of environmentally certified material. Under the revised regulation, small to medium-sized exporters are exempted from an obligation to provide SVLK certification and are only required to provide an export declaration without an expiry date. Pulp and paper manufacturers are unlikely to be affected due to their large size. The value of Indonesia’s timber product exports to the EU went up by 8.9 percent from US$593 million in 2013 to $645.9 million last year, accounting for around 9 percent of the total export value of the country’s timber products, according to data from the FLEGT-VPA annual report.

After the launch of an environmental campaign targeting the luxury hotel chain, Mandarin Oriental hotel, the palm oil giant Astra Argo Lestari, which is also one of Indonesia’s biggest plantation developers, announced an immediate moratorium on land clearing. Astra Argo claimed the moratorium as a major step to make their operations to comply with the standards of the Indonesia Palm Oil Pledge (IPOP). Astra Agro haven’t announced a no-deforestation policy, but it said that it was now in the process of formulating one.