Perrine Fournier is a trade and forests campaigner at the forests and rights NGO Fern
The view from the highest vantage point in Kabaena island is awe-inspiring. Mountain peaks coated with thin clouds rise over a thick blanket of vegetation.
But the natural beauty of this tropical island in Indonesia’s Southeast Sulawesi province, belies the human and environmental damage that’s unfolding below – and which is set to intensify.
This harm is driven by mining for the vast reserves of nickel which lie beneath the island’s surface. Nickel is defined as a ‘critical mineral’, as it’s an essential component of electric vehicle (EV) batteries. As countries shift away from fossil fuels, global demand for nickel has surged.
Mining companies have been granted access to vast swathes of Kabaena, with licenses awarded to mine around three-quarters of the island’s territory. Only a few mining concessions are currently operating – but their impact is already being felt deeply.
“Because of the mining, all we see is mud. Flooding,” says Sahrul, a local resident. Sahrul is the founder of Sagori, a group resisting mining on the island, and he says that mining has created social conflicts between its supporters and opponents: “Relationships within families are breaking because of the mining.”
Sahrul is the founder of Sagori, a group resisting mining on Kabaena
Amal, a 25-year-old tourism student, echoes these complaints. He says that while mining has brought economic benefits, it’s also brought environmental ruin. “The mining company broke our forests. They made us lose our river. Water is the main point of life, we get it from nature. But we’re losing it.”
Threatening the Sea Nomads
Reports corroborate these claims.
Indonesia is the world’s biggest nickel producer, and has the largest reserves on earth, most of which are in Sulawesi and Halmahera islands. In the so-called ‘nickel provinces’ of these islands, including Kabaena in Southeast Sulawesi, mining’s damage has manifested itself in different forms.
Last month, Satya Bumi, a local NGO working to protect Indonesia’s forests and ecosystems, published a report comprehensively documenting it.
They detailed the sea and river pollution contaminating once pristine waters, reducing fish stocks, causing children skin infections, and threatening the livelihoods of local people, particularly the Indigenous Bajau community – known as Sea Nomads for their exceptional diving ability.
Indonesia turns traditional Indigenous land into nickel industrial zone
Then there’s deforestation: mining for nickel is now the biggest cause of deforestation in the nickel mining provinces. Out of the 920,000 hectares (ha) of nickel mining concessions in Indonesia, about two-thirds are under forest cover.
So who’s driving this demand and what should be done to mitigate the damage it’s causing?
Energy transition
China, the world leader in producing and exporting EV batteries, has poured investments into Indonesia’s nickel industry since the latter banned raw nickel-ore exports in 2020, to try to boost investments in ‘downstream processing’ (such as refining and battery manufacturing).
In the three years to 2023, Indonesia signed deals worth more than US$15 billion for battery materials with major corporations including Hyundai, LG and Foxconn, Reuters reported last year. So far, however, European investment in Indonesia’s nickel industry has not materialised.
In July, the German chemical manufacturer BASF and the French mining multinational Eramet, pulled out of a huge nickel and cobalt refinery in Indonesia because of its impact on one of the last Indigenous tribes still living in voluntary isolation.
But Satya Bumi’s supply chain mapping of Kabaena’s nickel, provides evidence that it’s entering global supply chains, including to the EU.
What’s more, the EU is currently negotiating a major free trade agreement with Indonesia, and focusing much attention on securing the critical raw materials Europe needs for the green energy and digital transitions – for instance through its Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), which entered into force earlier this year.
The EU is therefore keen to strike a deal with Indonesia, believing it will support European investors to secure access to the raw materials that underpin its green investment strategies.
Children’s future
When this happens, EU investment must be built on a partnership with Indonesia which incentivises Indonesia to eliminate the environmental and social damage the industry is wreaking in Kabaena and elsewhere.
Indonesian civil society groups are already working to end this destruction, including by calling for nickel mining No Go Zones to limit forest and biodiversity loss. The Indonesian NGO Auriga Nusantara has reported that forests are disappearing twice as fast in areas surrounding nickel-processing plants than elsewhere.
It’s also essential that Indigenous Peoples and local communities who live in areas coveted by mining companies have their fundamental human right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) respected.
Tamrin, a 34-year-old coffee shop owner and father of five in Kabaena, has an unequivocal message for those oblivious to the human and environmental cost of their EV batteries: “If you want to buy an electric car, sure. It may be comfortable for you. But consider the places that are impacted by the mineral extraction… I hope to God my children have a future on this Island.”
The post Nickel mining for electric vehicles is destroying lives in Indonesia appeared first on Climate Home News.
Nickel mining for electric vehicles is destroying lives in Indonesia
After witnessing the effects of sea-level rise in the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, Pacific leaders on Tuesday used the pre-COP31 summit in Fiji to voice their frustration at the difficulties they have experienced in tapping the global climate finance system.
A small group of government leaders, climate negotiators and heads of development banks and climate funds took a trip to Tuvalu’s Funafuti atoll on Tuesday morning, travelling by road over land just 10-20 metres wide to visit a project that is building barriers to keep the sea from the land.
They then flew to Fiji for the pre-COP summit, where several Pacific leaders said they had been let down by the insufficient quantity, bad terms and slow speed of international finance to help them adapt to a warming climate that is bringing higher oceans, drought and more powerful storms to their shores.
“Right now, our islands are like a canoe that has been rammed by a massive foreign ship. Our canoe is taking on water, we are sinking, and what is the world’s response?” asked Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr.
“They hand us a tiny patch to cover a gaping hole,” he continued, “but the bureaucratic process just to receive that patch is so slow that the water fills the hole while we wait. Then to rebuild the vessel so that we can survive the next storm, we are offered loans, debt that adds weight to a sinking boat packaged in red tape so thick we can barely access it. And while we wait, the water continues to fill.”
Pacific leaders and Australia called again on governments to invest in the new Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which has been designed by the Pacific Islands Forum and is seeking $500 million in investments by COP31 in November.
It has around $180 million so far, but did not receive additional pledges during the UN General Assembly in New York. The PRF aims to invest to generate annual returns which it can give to projects like water tanks for drought-hit communities.
Witnessing sea level rise
The annual pre-COP gathering is usually a low-profile technical meeting of climate negotiators. But this year, Australia – which is the president of negotiations at COP31 – partnered with the Pacific to introduce a “leaders segment” in an attempt to shine a spotlight on climate issues affecting the region.
Fourteen government leaders – from Australia, Timor-Leste, Mauritius and the Pacific – made the trip. They were joined by the European Union’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra, the heads of the Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank and former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard.
On their return to Fiji, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale told the pre-COP leaders roundtable that the sea level rise they had witnessed was personal for him.
“Tuvalu was not just a site visit for me. I saw the story of my own saltwater people,” he said, adding that he, his daughter and his grandfather had lost their houses to sea level rise and that three-quarters of his electorate live on land that will be underwater in the next 30 years.
From the other side of the world, Antigua and Barbuda’s environment minister Michael Joseph said Tuvalu’s problems felt similar to those of his own Caribbean islands. “I saw vulnerable communities… just metres from the sea and people determined to remain on their land, preserve their culture and way of life,” he said.
A group of Fijian schoolchildren told the leaders it was not just sea level rise the Pacific struggles with but also heatwaves, droughts and storms, which worry their families and prevent them from learning.
Climate finance red-tape
Several Pacific leaders criticised the world’s leaders for not doing enough to combat climate change. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown expressed disappointment that only two non-Pacific leaders had come to the pre-COP, a fact Australian media widely picked up on to label the event a flop and question its A$20 million (US$14m) price tag.
“We’ve heard a lot of numbers these last two days,” Brown said. “Let me share one of my own. More than 50 invitations extended to world leaders… to see for themselves what high emissions are doing to our nations and our ocean – an ocean that covers nearly one-third of the Earth’s surface.”
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He called for more climate finance for the Pacific, asking “if the world is prepared to assess our suitability for climate finance, why is it not equally prepared to scrutinise whether those responsible for delivering it are meeting their obligations?”
Like Palau’s president Whipps, Naoero’s President David Adeang criticised the red tape that is hindering access to climate finance as well as a lack of money, complaining especially about “complicated procedures, heavy reporting, delays in approval and disbursement”.
Adeang added that “the way we assess vulnerability matters”, adding that it should be measured by more than income. Naoero, for example, is classified by the World Bank as high-income, restricting which climate finance it is eligible for.
Action plan to improve access
On Thursday, the Australian government will present a statement and action plan on improving access to climate finance for small island developing states and least developed countries, which it is asking other countries and organisations to endorse.
The statement addresses some of these Pacific complaints as well as acknowledging that progress has already been made on simplifying access by multilateral development banks and climate funds.
In Fiji, Asian Development Bank head Masato Kanda said his institution is “tailoring our finance and operations to island realities” because “your children and their children should be able to grow old in the countries their ancestors have called home for millennia”.
The executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF), Mafalda Duarte, said that the GCF-backed coastal adaptation project leaders visited in Tuvalu shows that “climate finance works” although – as the project took eight years to implement – “it takes time, and therefore we have no time to waste”.
Australia calls for optimism
While Pacific leaders expressed concern that the world is set to blast past its agreed 1.5C warming limit, endangering their nations, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called for “optimism”. “If people think there is no hope, then they will not strive to get the change that we need,” he said.
He said that when he attended his first COP in 2005, Australia’s renewable energy target was 2%. Its target is now 82% renewable electricity by 2030.
While Albanese promoted Australia’s success at electrifying homes and businesses and rolling out renewables, he has been criticised by climate campaigners for extending the production of fossil fuels, including coal – largely for export.
France’s Minister for Ecological Transition Monique Barbut defended the European Union’s climate action at the pre-COP meeting. She said the continent was heating up and reducing emissions faster and providing more climate finance than anywhere else in the world.
“It is time for all major emitters to step up and do their fair share” on climate finance, she said. Most developing countries with large emissions have fiercely resisted joining the club of climate finance donors, arguing they have played a disproportionately small historic role in causing climate change.
Barbut, as well as Palau’s president Whipps, called for the next flagship scientific assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be finished by COP33 in 2028, in time to inform the next global stocktake of national climate action.
This timeline has been opposed by countries like India, Saudi Arabia and China, who argue it would put an unfair burden on developing countries. Barbut said countries should “support the work of the IPCC rather than sabotage its calendar”.
Barbut said that governments should agree at COP31 to aim to raise the share of “clean electricity” in final energy consumption to 35% by 2035. The Turkish and Australian governments have pushed for this goal although without specifying that the electricity should be “clean”. Barbut added that COP31 should also agree to cut emissions of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
The post Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pacific leaders rail at climate finance failures after pre-COP trip to Tuvalu
Jacynta Fa’amau is a Pacific campaigner at global grassroots climate movement 350.org and a secretariat member of Pacific Climate Warriors.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of Queensland’s Saraji coal mine. Standing at the edge of the enormous pit, my brain scrambled for words as I scanned the earth’s open wound – a whole island could probably fit inside it.
Looking down, I noticed footprints of an emu and a koala, pressed and dried in what was once a puddle – signs of how drought had driven animals in desperate search of water, so dangerously close to the coal trucks and heavy machinery ahead.
Earlier this year, I joined a small group of Pacific Islanders on a journey through the Bowen Basin to learn from First Nations communities battling Australia’s mammoth coal industry. Of the more than 40 coal mines operating in the area, BHP & Mitsubishi Alliance’s Saraji mine is one of the largest. So it came as a painful shock to us when in August, the Australian government approved the mine’s extension just months after our visit.
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Witnessing coal extraction is devastating. It is bad enough to see what pillaging tonnes of coal can do to a mine’s immediate surroundings: dry creek beds, dwindling wildlife, denuded land. But to know that this coal will be shipped across the ocean, bring air pollution, and eventually lead to the destruction of Pacific islands thousands of miles away is another kind of heartbreak.
Rising ocean waters
I’m an Australian-born Samoan. In 2002, I visited my family home for the first time. My father took me to the rural community where generations of my family were raised. He did not have the words to describe how much has changed since rising ocean waters had taken away almost a third of the beach.
I learned of how we had to relocate my great‑great‑grandparents’ grave to higher ground twice in the last 15 years. Of how my cousins have to paddle out further to sea to catch fish, since warmer waters have destroyed much of the reef. Of how the ocean crashes so close to my uncle’s home that he had to build a new house further away.
