WWF

Orange roughy are easy to over fish. So, humans do. But that doesn't seem to be stopping moves to re-define them as 'sustainable' by the Marine Stewardship Council.

True, when we started fishing orange roughy we didn’t know that this slow-growing, long-lived, deep water fish was particularly susceptible. But now we definitely do. Orange roughy can live to a staggering 150 years old, and are at least 30 years old before they are mature enough to breed. To put that into context: there are probably orange roughy alive today that were born when Queen Victoria was on the throne, and they take about 10 times longer to mature than Atlantic cod.

Good news for rhino fans: last week, researchers announced the first live encounter with a Sumatran rhino in Borneo for over 40 years. But the human pressures that have pushed this species to the brink of extinction are still very much in play.

Another blow has been delivered to the credibility of Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), thanks to some excellent work by WWF. In a survey of the certification bodies that APP regularly references to prop up its flimsy claims of sustainability, none of them would support APP's assertions about its environmental performance.

Asia Pulp and Paper – the company doing so much to jeopardise the future of Indonesia's rainforests – has done some pretty stupid things in the past. But pulping the trees in its own tiger sanctuary is astonishingly dumb.

And yet that's exactly what APP has done.