This regional health forum includes the special issue on world health day 2008 theme: protecting health from climate change.

With the growing potentialities and respect of traditional knowledge for sustainable
forest management, community-based forest management (CBFM) has been advocated
in the mainstream discussion of forest management and sustaining livelihood of local

Embracing the opportunities provided by democratization and decentralization, the
Wonosobo district of Central Java, Indonesia, enacted a local regulation for participa-tory
forestry. The regulation emphasized rights-based political participation and as such
entailed significant participation by civil society groups. However, this regulation faced
a backlash from the remaining representatives of the old authoritarian state. They
demanded a state-created utilitarian-based participatory forestry scheme, emphasizing

Indonesia and Malaysia have long denied that their tropical forests are being burned to make way for lucrative palm oil plantations. It seems they've been lying through their teeth. Between 1990 and 2005 palm plantations rocketed by 1.87 million hectares in Malaysia and by more than 3 million hectares in Indonesia.

Hidden cameras in the jungles of Indonesia's Java island have captured rare footage of the world's most threatened rhino, boosting efforts to save it from extinction, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF),, said on Thursday. ' Two camera traps set up by the environmental group in the remote Ujung Kulon national park have yielded footage of the endangered Javan rhinoceros, said Adhi Hariyadi, leader of the WWF project.

The collapse of the world's fastest-growing mud volcano could redirect nearby rivers and threaten villages in Indonesia, researchers said on Wednesday. The central part of the volcano on the island of Java is collapsing at a rate of up to three metres a day sporadically, they reported in the journal Environmental Geology. "Sidoarjo is a populated region and is collapsing as a result of the birth and growth of Lusi," Richard Davies, a geologist at Britain's University of Durham.

Leaders across Asia are starting to give in on the prickly issue of fuel subsidies, hiking prices in the face of $130 a barrel oil, but careful calibration of the steps may allow them to get away with it. Indonesia jacked up fuel prices by an average of 28.7 percent from Saturday, Sri Lanka followed with its own increase on Sunday and Bangladesh said it planned an increase soon. India is also considering such a move. The odd man out is China, which has strong finances and has said it does not plan to raise prices soon.

The current food crisis has been largely policy-driven, which is probably good news because it means that policies can also reverse the process.

Precisely when many in the developed bloc were frantically counting their money at the height of a surreal shock over subprime rate, the globalising world was jolted by a potential crisis of subsistence that would hit the poor and other vulnerable sections very hard. Is there a link, therefore, between the slippery subprime banking rate and the soaring prices of rice and other staples?

Rising food prices could spark worldwide unrest and threaten political stability, the United Nations

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