Mongabay series: Southeast Asian infrastructure

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…

When Chinese President Xi Jinping extolls China’s Belt & Road Initiative, he uses words like “green”, “low carbon” and “sustainable”. Is this reality or just ‘greenwashing’—vague and flimsy promises that…

GEORGE TOWN, Malaysia — Muddy carpets and soaked furniture lay in moldering piles on the streets of this state capital. It was Sunday morning, Oct. 29, 2017. Eight days earlier,…

Spring Energy is the just the sort of homegrown, super successful, keenly entrepreneurial company that developing nations across the world crave. Based in a tidy three-story building not far from…

KUCHING, Malaysia —  As governments in Southeast Asia target economic growth through infrastructure development, China, the world’s second-largest economy, has emerged as a ready funder for some of the most…

JAKARTA — Twenty-five of the world’s top environmental scientists have lambasted plans to construct a hydroelectric dam in northern Sumatra, Indonesia, because it would threaten the rarest species of great…

Landowners in Papua New Guinea’s Hela province have threatened to expand and escalate their blockade of a natural gas project there, after an attempt at negotiation fell through. Plant operator…

PORT MORESBY — Heavily armed civilian groups have burned and damaged ExxonMobil construction equipment in a land dispute involving a natural gas plant in Papua New Guinea. The civil unrest…

It’s time to slow the pace of the wave of road, dam and railroad building sweeping over the globe, says Bill Laurance, a tropical ecologist at James Cook University in…

Indonesia, one of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters, is turning to green finance markets to fund new development projects it promises will be both environmentally and socially friendly. In…

Southeast Asia is a global biodiversity hotspot, and Indonesia and Malaysia are no exception, harboring some of the highest levels of species diversity in the world. Yet those two countries…

In 2008, when a consortium led by ExxonMobil was drumming up support for a $19 billion natural gas extraction and processing project in Papua New Guinea, proponents of the development…

JAKARTA — Officials in the Indonesian province of Aceh have vowed to safeguard the last known habitat shared by tigers, orangutans, rhinos and elephants, but concerns abound that the proposed…

JAKARTA — Activists in Indonesia have called on the Chinese government to withdraw funding for a hydroelectric dam that threatens to fragment the only known habitat of the most endangered…