Mongabay series: Southeast Asian infrastructure

While scientists worked to confirm Tapanuli orangutans were a distinct species, pressure was mounting on the apes' habitat.

Geneticists, morphologists and behavioral scientists reveal the inside story of how their research led to the description of the Tapanuli orangutan.

JAKARTA — Usman’s been glued to the TV news lately. A young fisherman living in Batang, along the northeastern coast of Indonesia’s main island of Java, Usman is closely following…

Papua New Guinea is a canopy-covered country, with a substantial chunk of the world's third-largest rainforest  and some 7 percent of global biodiversity. It is home to many endemic species,…

China’s ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative could introduce alien invasive species into several countries, threatening their native biodiversity, warns a new study. Announced by Chinese President Xi Jinping in…

MADANG, Papua New Guinea — On the banks of the Banab River in Papua New Guinea’s northern province of Madang, rows of makeshift wooden shops, eateries and huts have popped…

JAKARTA — Road projects throughout Indonesian Borneo threaten to fragment a third of the forest habitat currently accessible to the island’s wildlife, according to a new study. Completion of ongoing…

GEMBOGL, Papua New Guinea — In Papua New Guinea’s central highland province of Simbu, residents of the mountainous Gembogl district eagerly await the completion of a long-overdue road upgrade that…

An ambitious plan to mine precious minerals from the ocean floor off the coast of Papua New Guinea looks to have run aground due to the developer's financial problems. In…

JAKARTA — Four months after activists in Bali celebrated what they believed was the end of a controversial plan to develop part of the island’s mangrove-rich Benoa Bay, the scheme…

Violence in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua has stalled a massive infrastructure project that researchers have separately warned may threaten the island's ecological health and the livelihood of its residents.…

The construction of a hydroelectric dam in Thailand in the 1980s devastated the area’s wild birds, leaving behind just a few of the many species that once inhabited the region,…

The general public knows about the precarious situation of the world’s mostly recently identified great ape — the Tapanuli orangutan — within the Batang Toru Ecosystem. There, the construction of…

The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit that opens in Port Moresby this week is supposed to be a showcase of Papua New Guinea’s hosting, but the run-up to the…

JAKARTA — Environmental activists in Indonesia have called on South Korean funders to withdraw their support for new coal-fired plants that they warn will be the most polluting in the…

Politicians and planners often sell roads as wholly beneficial to communities. New arteries open up opportunities for employment, connections to markets and access to services such as health care, so…

“I lost everything,” says Joe Moses, recalling the day homes in his community of Paga Hill were demolished. Moses is one of thousands of Papua New Guineans who have lost…

JAKARTA — The last place on Earth that’s home to wild tigers, rhinos, orangutans and elephants may lose these and countless other species to make way for a $3 billion…

JAKARTA — The developers of a new interactive map hope to shine a light on deforestation in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua, where industrial-scale agriculture threatens one of the world’s…

JAKARTA — A planned hydroelectric dam that threatens the world’s most endangered great ape is already having an impact, days after a ringing endorsement from Indonesian officials and academics. On…

JAKARTA — The Jakarta administration says it has finally pulled the plug on a $40 billion land reclamation project pushed by the Indonesian government off the coast of the nation’s…

JOHOR BAHRU, Malaysia – On Jan. 1, 2014, fishermen near Kampong Pok, a village on Malaysia’s southern shore, were alarmed to find a fleet of barges and dredgers dumping sand…

Traditional landholders in the Papua New Guinea highlands say they finally see signs of progress in a cycle of contentious negotiations over land rights and royalties at a massive ExxonMobil-led…

DENPASAR, Indonesia — Hundreds of people in Bali are celebrating a key victory against a multi-billion-dollar land reclamation project that would have destroyed vast swaths of mangroves on the resort…

KUANTAN, Malaysia — Beijing is more than 4,200 kilometers (2,600 miles) north of the sandy beaches, oil palm plantations and tropical forests that distinguish peninsula Malaysia’s less prosperous South China…

JAKARTA — Locals and activists have denounced plans to build tourism infrastructure in Indonesia’s Komodo National Park, a string of sun-kissed islands best known for their resident giant lizards. Developers…

KUALA LUMPUR — Before the May 9 election that swept Najib Razak and his Barisan Nasional coalition from power, the then prime minister of Malaysia presided over one of the…

Laos will suspend new hydropower projects and carry out safety inspections of all existing dams, the government announced last week. The Aug. 7 decision came in the aftermath of the…

KUALA LUMPUR — By 2012, when then-prime minister Najib Razak formally launched the River of Life project to improve water quality and restore the aesthetic virtue of the Klang River,…

Two weeks after a dam in the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydropower facility collapsed in southern Laos, sending millions of tonnes of water crashing through villages downstream, authorities are still counting the…