ISLAMABAD: The twisting road that leads to Nusantara, the future capital of Indonesia, is lined with thick rainforest and pockets of plantations where monkeys enjoy a laze out on the tarmac.
Located in eastern Borneo — the third largest island in the world — Nusantara is set to replace polluted and sinking Jakarta as East Asian country’s political center by late 2024. But the two-hour drive from Balikpapan city to the vast greenery of Nusantara’s Point Zero reveals the scope of the new capital’s potential impact on a biodiverse area that is the habitat of thousands of plant and animal species.
With construction set to speed up this year, environmentalists warn building a metropolis will ramp up deforestation in one of the world’s oldest and largest stretches of tropical rainforest, estimated to be more than one hundred million years old.
A forest campaigner for the environmental group Walhi, Uli Arta Siagian said that the project was going to be a massive ecological disaster.
The island called as ‘the lungs of the world’ by Indonesians, shared with Brunei and Malaysia is habitate of clouded leopards, long-nosed monkeys, flying fox-bats, pig-tailed macaques and the smallest rhinos on the planet.
New capital Nusantara to host 1.9m residents
But the Indonesian government says that by 2045, the new capital Nusantara will host 1.9 million residents, more than twice of the population of Balikpapan, importing a wave of industrial and human activity into the center of Borneo.
Siagian said that drastic changes to the land’s topography and the human-made disasters that could follow will be far more difficult to mitigate compared to natural disasters.
Indonesia has also listed in countries having the highest rates of deforestation linked to farming and logging, mining and it is accused of allowing companies to operate in Borneo with little checks.
Capital Java sinks
However, the government says it wanted to spread economic development around the large archipelago country, and to move away from the capital Java before it sinks due to extreme groundwater extraction. — AFP/APP
