How a global green boom is rearranging lives, land and power
In this sweeping investigation for Mongabay, journalist Irfan Maulana traces the human cost and political stakes of Indonesia’s nickel rush, moving between the intimate realities of those living near the mines and smelters and the national ambitions driving the world’s largest nickel producer.
The story opens with workers like Arif, a twenty-three-year-old from a coastal village in Sulawesi, who arrived at a nickel industrial park convinced he had found a way out of poverty. What he discovered instead was a workplace defined by twelve-hour shifts, minimal safety training and the constant roar of furnaces that blur the boundary between exhaustion and danger. His testimony sits at the heart of the piece, hope and harm unfolding in the same breath, in a sector the government hails as the backbone of Indonesia’s economic future.
Across the islands, families living near smelting zones describe a quieter but equally destabilising transformation. Fishermen return to waters that no longer yield predictable harvests; women show jars of murky well water they now buy in plastic jugs. The investigation neither isolates these accounts as mere local grievances nor romanticises them. Instead, it shows how these disruptions mirror the broader political push to cement Indonesia’s role in the global electric-vehicle supply chain.
Because behind every shift in Arif’s furnace or every failed fishing trip lies a national decision: Indonesia’s choice, beginning in 2020, to ban raw ore exports and require nickel processing to occur domestically. That policy has drawn billions in foreign investment and reshaped global battery markets, but it has also consolidated power in the hands of a few politically connected companies. Many of these operate joint ventures with Chinese firms, whose capital and technology underpin the industry’s explosive growth.
Environmental protections become another point where human experience and political ambition collide. The article shows villagers pointing to newly eroded hillsides or plantations coated in dust, even as government officials speak of “national development” and the necessity of short-term sacrifice. The nickel industry is promoted internationally as a pillar of the green transition, yet domestically it remains powered largely by coal, a contradiction that echoes through the landscapes where communities feel the immediate consequences.
Indigenous groups provide some of the investigation’s most powerful voices. In parts of Halmahera and Central Sulawesi, elders recount how forests central to customary practice have been cleared for mining concessions negotiated far from their villages. They speak not only of ecological loss but of political marginalisation: decisions made by Jakarta, facilitated by foreign investors, and rubber-stamped by regional officials under pressure to deliver economic growth. Their resistance, woven through ceremony, oral histories and community mapping, becomes a counter-narrative to the state’s vision of progress.
As Irfan Maulana widens the frame, the political dimensions sharpen. Indonesia positions itself as indispensable to the global future of electric vehicles, using its resource dominance to bargain with China, the United States and the European Union. The government’s strategy rests on transforming raw minerals into higher-value products, but this ambition often outpaces environmental oversight and labour protections. The investigation documents rising accident rates, limited unionisation and complex hierarchies between Indonesian and Chinese workers, all shaped by the geopolitics of investment.
International scrutiny is building, yet the investigation underscores that many Western companies remain eager to secure Indonesian nickel regardless of the human or environmental cost. The global clean-energy transition, the article suggests, risks replicating the extractive inequalities of the fossil-fuel era just with different minerals, different landscapes and different communities absorbing the fallout.
Toward its conclusion, the piece returns to the people whose lives mark the frontlines of this transformation. Arif still works at the smelter, hopeful the job will eventually stabilise his family’s finances, though he worries what the fumes will mean for his lungs in a decade. Fishermen continue to wake before dawn even as their yields decline. Indigenous families move between protest and negotiation, determined not to be erased from the land that holds their history.
Original article Penjaga Hutan Halmahera Tersingkir Industri Nikel by Irfan Maulana published in Indonesian by Mongabay.co.id on 10 September 2025.
It is available here.
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