Mongabay series: Southeast Asian infrastructure

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…

Even as scientists introduced the world to a new species of orangutan in 2017 — one of only seven non-human great apes alive today — they were already working to…

Even as scientists introduced the world to a new species of orangutan in 2017 — one of only seven non-human great apes alive today — they were already working to…

LANGKAWI, Malaysia – In Kilim Karst Geoforest Park, part of Langkawi UNESCO Global Geopark, a man in T-shirt and shorts laughs with his friends as one of the long-tailed macaques…

KENDARI, Indonesia — Like most residents of the tiny island of Bungkutoko in Indonesia’s Southeast Sulawesi province, Mahrudin and Nurhaeti are a fishing family. But their boat has remained beached…

Traditional landowners in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, have exerted their power of veto under the autonomous region's new mining laws and rejected a corporate bid by Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL)…

Ahead of a housing development in Panama, an assessor tasked with figuring out how the plans might affect local forests reported that about a dozen species of birds lived in…

Around the world, there’s a push for rapid infrastructure development, and nowhere is that truer than in Southeast Asia. Roads, seen by the World Bank as a “blunt instrument” for…

JAKARTA – It was supposed to be about cracking down on the illegal wildlife trade, as traffickers move online. But a conservation bill now making its way through Indonesia’s parliament…

HONIARA, Solomon Islands – In April 2016, thousands of villagers living in the vicinity of the Gold Ridge Mine in the southwest Pacific nation of the Solomon Islands braced themselves…

When Indonesian President Joko Widodo took office in October 2014, he made it clear that one of his key domestic policies was to develop and upgrade infrastructure across the archipelago.…

Roads can be arteries that ferry goods and people, connect communities and markets and bolster economic development. But if they’re not well-planned, they can instigate conflict, saddle countries with debt…

AMPANG, Malaysia – Taman Rimba Ampang was once a peaceful retreat from the bustle of Malaysia’s capital, a place where Kuala Lumpur’s residents could paddle in the shallow waters of…

On Sept. 25, amid a continuing crackdown on media, political opposition and civil society described by commentators as “a slide into dictatorship,” Prime Minister Hun Sen officially launched Cambodia’s biggest…

JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has allowed work to resume on a $40 billion project to build 17 artificial islands off the northern coast of the capital Jakarta, overturning a…

Experts gathered last week in Malaysia’s capital to explore ways to maximize the benefits of road projects without severely impacting the environment.