- Beset by criticism over its environmental and social impacts, the controversial project of building Indonesia’s new capital city in the Bornean jungle has finally come out with guidelines for biodiversity management.
- The country’s president has hailed the Nusantara project as a “green forest city,” but just 16% of its total area is currently intact rainforest.
- The new biodiversity master plan outlines a four-point mitigation policy of avoiding harm, minimizing any inevitable impacts, restoring damaged landscapes, and compensating for residual impacts.
- The master plan considered input from experts, but several didn’t make it into the final document, including a call for the mitigation policy to extend to a wider area beyond the Nusantara site.
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has rolled out what it calls a “biodiversity management master plan” amid mounting criticism of the environmental and social threats posed by the construction of the country’s new capital city in the Bornean forest.
The plan, published March 26, sets out a number of action plans to preserve wildlife habitat, protect species and restore damaged ecosystems in the new capital, known as Nusantara, through to 2029.
The ultimate goal is to ensure 65% of the area of the new capital is tropical rainforest, by designating protected areas and rehabilitating degraded lands and forests.
The new city’s “protected” zone spans 177,000 hectares (437,400 acres), of which only 2% is currently undisturbed natural forest. Less than a quarter is degraded or secondary forest — a legacy of logging and fires — while the rest comprises plantation and mining concessions. With such a small patch of intact forest to start from, and such a large swath of degraded land to reforest, achieving what President Joko Widodo calls a “green forest city” will be a challenge, experts say.
From late 2022 until the end of 2023, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry reforested just 1,441 hectares (3,561 acres) of the Nusantara site, a miniscule fraction of the government target of reforesting 120,000 hectares (296,500 acres) until 2045.
The reforestation efforts have been stumped by haphazard planting, with nonnative tree species being planted, coupled with poor planting practices and monitoring, experts found.
For the reforestation program to succeed, it’s important for the government to pay attention to all aspects of the environment, including the soil conditions and the climate, according to Willie Smits, founder of the nonprofit Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation and a member of an independent committee of nine experts monitoring the environmental and social aspects of the Nusantara project.
Understanding these will allow the government to determine the right tree species to plant so they can grow to form a tropical rainforest, rather than a monoculture tree plantation, Smits said. To date, however, the seed selection has been haphazard.
“To bring back the wildlife, it’s important to choose the right [tree] species as well. Right now, they are collecting lots of seeds, but randomly,” Smits said.
But despite the hurdles, he said, it’s possible to return the landscape back into rainforest. He cited the case of Samboja Lestari, the BOSF’s orangutan rescue and rehabilitation center that doubles as a tropical rainforest reforestation project in Samboja, a neighboring subdistrict to Nusantara.
The 1,854-hectare (4,581-acre) Samboja Lestari site used to be deforested land covered in the highly fire-prone cogon grass and devoid of trees and wildlife. The BOSF led a campaign to plant nearly 1,000 tree species to reforest the land, resulting in the growth of secondary forest and the return of 163 species of birds and other wildlife, Smits said.
“So we can learn from existing experience in the new capital site itself,” he said.
Monitoring and education
As part of the new master plan, the government agency overseeing the development of Nusantara, known as the OIKN, has identified seven areas across the site and surroundings that have high biodiversity, and thus high conservation value. It says it has also cataloged 3,889 species of wildlife, including 454 bird, 206 reptile and 168 mammal species, occurring within a 50-kilometer (30-mile) radius of Nusantara.
These include Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus), Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris), and various species of hornbills.
To ensure the survival of these species, the OIKN says it will engage experts, map critical ecosystems and species, prevent land clearing or logging during breeding seasons, translocate plants and animals, and monitor its programs and their progress.
“We will routinely monitor [ecosystems and habitats] both using satellites as well as on-the-ground verification,” said Pungky Widiaryanto, the director of forest use and water resource development at the OIKN.
The agency will also involve local and Indigenous communities in monitoring the landscape and conservation efforts, according to Myrna Asnawati Safitri, the OIKN’s deputy for the environment and natural resources.
“We will build knowledge about forest and forest management in Nusantara by collecting knowledge from many sources, including traditional knowledge. And we, as a government entity, will facilitate this sharing of knowledge,” she said.
Education is a critical component of the biodiversity protection programs being planned, according to the master plan, as the new capital is expected to eventually see the influx of up to 2 million inhabitants by 2045.
These people will have to live side by side with the wildlife in the various high conservation value areas, so it’s important for the government to educate and change the mindset of people who will live in Nusantara, Myrna said. This will help prevent incidents of human-wildlife conflict, she added.
“How to make people in Nusantara have a mindset that’s willing to share living space with other species? This is a new thing for Indonesia, so we are preparing campaign and education [for future citizens of Nusantara],” Myrna said.
Avoid, minimize, restore
The master plan outlines a four-point hierarchy to mitigate the impacts of the ongoing Nusantara construction on the environment. The first point is avoidance, in which developers must take measures to avoid creating impacts from the outset by avoiding building infrastructure inside or near critical habitats or key species’ breeding grounds.
The main instance of avoidance in the project so far is the scrapping of the initial plan to build the new capital next to the bay in Balikpapan, a busy port city in East Kalimantan province. But because there are mangrove forests and high biodiversity in the Balikpapan Bay area, the Nusantara project was eventually moved farther inland, Pungky said.
The second mitigation point, in case avoidance isn’t feasible, is minimization to reduce the duration, intensity and extent of impacts that are unavoidable. Examples include measures to reduce noise and pollution, designing power lines to reduce the likelihood of bird electrocutions, and building wildlife road crossings.
Pungky cited the case of the toll road being built to connect Nusantara to Balikpapan, which should halve the travel time from the current to current 2 hours. The project initially called for running the road along a direct route that would cut through a region called Sepaku, he said. But an assessment showed this would have a high environmental impact.
As a result, the OIKN has rerouted the planned road to bypass Sepaku. However, the new route cuts through the forested buffer zone of the Sungai Wain protection forest, which is home to old-growth dipterocarp rainforest and some of the world’s most threatened wildlife, including sun bears, a vulnerable species that’s the Balikpapan mascot, and orangutans.
Activists have warned that the road will cut off natural wildlife corridors, fragmenting their habitat. An incident last year in which an orangutan was seen crossing the site of the road construction indicates the project is already impacting wildlife, they say.
This is where another minimization measure, artificial wildlife corridors in the form of tunnels and bridges, comes in, according to Pungky.
“We’re building artificial corridors so that the wildlife can cross from the Sungai Wain protection forest to Balikpapan Bay,” he said. The road is scheduled to open in June 2024.
The third mitigation point is rehabilitation and restoration, in which developers must return an impacted area back to its original state, or at least return the basic ecological functions or ecosystem services, such as through planting trees.
The last mitigation point is compensation, in which conservation measures are taken to compensate for residual impacts on biodiversity arising from project activities as well as avoidance, minimization, and restoration actions.
Not all expert recommendations taken up
While the biodiversity management master plan has incorporated input from experts, several recommendations didn’t make it into the final document.
One is for the master plan to cover a larger area, beyond a 50-km radius, given the continuity of ecosystems running through this part of eastern Borneo. But this is hampered by jurisdictional issues, according to the OIKN’s Myrna.
“We’re struggling [to do that] because we have to talk with other administrative regions around Nusantara, which might take a longer time,” she said. “Meanwhile, there’s a pressing need to have a master plan. So we limit our scope to Nusantara first. If local governments have the same understanding [of biodiversity protection], then we can expand our scope [in future].”
Another expert recommendation that wasn’t adopted was for more orangutans to be introduced into the Nusantara landscape, Pungky said. But while there are orangutans in the area, the species isn’t native to this site, he said. Instead, these are orangutans that have been rescued from the illegal wildlife trade or from human-wildlife conflict and rewilded in nearby sites like the Sungai Wain protection forest and Samboja Lestari, Pungky said.
“There are still debates [on whether this is a good idea], and so we can’t accommodate the idea yet,” he said.
Banner image: Two male proboscis monkeys in Malaysian Borneo. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
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