A billion-dollar hydroelectric dam development in Indonesia that threatens the habitat of the world’s rarest great ape has sparked fresh concerns about the effects of China’s globe-spanning infrastructure drive.
The site of the dam in the Batang Toru rainforest on Sumatra Island is the only known habitat of the Tapanuli orangutan, a newly discovered species that numbers about 800 individuals in total.
The US$1.6 billion project, which is expected to be operational by 2022, is to cut through the heart of the critically endangered animal’s habitat, which is also home to agile gibbons, siamangs and Sumatran tigers.
Indonesian firm PT North Sumatra Hydro Energy is building the power plant with backing from Sinosure, a Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) that insures overseas investment projects, and the Bank of China, company documents show.
Chinese SOE Sinohydro, which built the mammoth Three Gorges Dam, has been awarded the design and construction contract for the project.
The development is one of dozens being pushed by the Indonesian government to improve electricity supply throughout the sprawling archipelago, parts of which are regularly plagued by blackouts.
However, the Chinese-backed project has sparked fierce resistance from conservationists, who said the potential environmental risk has already seen the World Bank Group shy away from involvement.
However, its Chinese backers appear undeterred, something critics said underscores the troubling environmental impact of Beijing’s trademark Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to link Asia, Europe and Africa with a network of ports, highways and railways.
“This issue is becoming in some ways the face of the Belt and Road Initiative,” Professor Bill Laurance, director of the Center for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University in Australia, told reporters. “I think this crystallizes in a way that people can understand what a tsunami of 7,000-plus projects will mean for nature.”
Until recently, scientists thought there were only two genetically distinct types of orangutan, Bornean and Sumatran.
However, in 1997 biological anthropologist Erik Meijaard observed an isolated population of the great apes in Batang Toru, south of the known habitat for Sumatran orangutans, and scientists began to investigate if it was a unique species.
Researchers studied the DNA, skulls and teeth of 33 orangutans killed in human-animal conflict before concluding that they had indeed discovered a new species, giving it the scientific name Pongo tapanuliensis or Tapanuli orangutan.
The 510-megawatt dam, which is to supply peak-load electricity to North Sumatra Province, would flood part of the ape’s habitat and include a network of roads and high-voltage transmission lines.
Critics have said it will fragment the three existing populations, who are living in a tract of forest less than one-fifth the size of the greater Jakarta region, and lead to inbreeding.
Meijaard said the dam would be the “death knell” for the animal.
“Roads bring in hunters [and] settlers — it’s the start, generally, of things falling apart,” he said.
However, the plight of the ape seems to have been given little attention in the environmental impact assessment by PT North Sumatra Hydro Energy, according to conservationists and scientists who have seen the document.
In August, the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) filed a legal challenge against the environmental permit approved by the North Sumatran government, saying it failed to address the dam’s impact on wildlife, communities living downstream, or the risk of damage from earthquakes in the seismically active region.
PT North Sumatra Hydro Energy and the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry declined to respond to requests for comment.
Bank of China said in a statement that it did not comment on specific projects, but added that it takes “all relevant factors into consideration when formulating policies and making decisions.”
The World Bank, through its sister organization the International Finance Corp, declined to comment on any aspect of its initial ties to the project — outlined in World Bank documents dated March last year — or environmentalists’ claims it pulled out due to habitat concerns.
“We really hope the financial backers of this project will see there are environmental and social problems with the project and decide not to support the project,” said Yuyun Eknas of Walhi.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema