A Nickel Rush Threatens Indonesia’s Last Nomadic Tribes and Its Forests, Fishermen and Farmers

The country holds nearly half of the world’s known deposits of a metal critical to the energy transition, but digging and smelting it is leading to deforestation, flooding and contamination.

Deep in the backcountry here, Sumean Gebe, 42, lives with Bede Yuli, 39, and his two children in the forest around Dodaga Village, about four hours by road from the capital of North Maluku Province. Every so often, they’ll move to a different forest.

“We have been like this since we were little,” he said. “Usually we will make a bivouac [a temporary shelter] with a roof of palm leaves and tarpaulin. We are comfortable living there.” 

As the head of the family, he spends his days hunting animals in the forest to meet his relatives’ food needs.

 

“Our food is always taken from the forest,” said Sumean, who hunts wild boar, deer and other game to cook in a temporary kitchen made of bamboo. 

While in the forest, he also harvests damar resin, which is used in varnish and as a hardener for bee’s wax, that he can sell in the village.

Sumean and his family are not alone. Beside the Kali Meja River near his latest bivouac, Etus Hurata, 56, and Tatoyo Penes, 64, subsist gathering sago, a starch similar to tapioca extracted from the pith of palm trees. Despite growing more frail with age, their steps are agile when they are on the sago plantation, armed with bamboo sticks and machetes to collect the sago that is processed into the ingredients of their daily diet.

During one of their journeys to harvest sago, they meet Daniel Totabo, 27, who is looking for sogili (eel) in the middle of the fast-flowing river. When the dry season comes, the volume of water drops slightly, allowing him to look for fish further toward the middle of the river, where his quarry is more abundant.

They are all part of the Indigenous O’Hongana Manyawa— “People of the forest” in their language. Often referred to as the Tobelo Dalam, they are one of the last nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes in Indonesia. Always dependent on the dense forests of Halmahera for their livelihood, the tribe has developed customs that respect the jungle and its contents and protect them from various threatening activities. The flourishing of the people and the forest have been connected for hundreds of years.

According to data from Survival International, 300-500 O’Hongana Manyawa people still reside in the forested interior of the island of Halmahera. 

The latest research from the Association of Indigenous Peoples Defenders of Nusantara identified 21 matarumah (lineages) of this tribe, each consisting of four to five heads of families, that inhabit the Halmahera mainland. The tribes have rarely had direct contact with people outside the forest.

But now, huge areas of their territory have been allocated to mining companies, and in some areas, excavators are already at work. Most recently, their relationship with the forest has been disturbed by nickel dredging projects in several corners of Halmahera. Indonesia holds about 42 percent of the world’s total nickel reserves, and it is planning to maximize mining it to meet the steep rise in global demand for the metal critical to the energy transition. But mining Indonesian nickel ore requires felling the forests atop the deposits.

Digital maps at Nusantara Atlas, a platform that monitors deforestation and forest fires in Equatorial Asia, show at least four mining companies operating within 50 to 100 kilometers of the forests inhabited by Indigenous peoples. This number is likely to increase in the next few years as global demand for nickel keeps rising.

“If it continues like this, the forests in Halmahera will be destroyed,” Sumean said. “The trees will be cut down and the animals will be driven out and die because their homes have been completely cleared. Then where will we live?” 

Mining activities have made it hard for Bawehe Bidos, a member of the O’Hongana Manyawa tribe, to get food from the forest. “If heavy equipment has entered the forest, the animals will definitely choose to stay away,” said Bawehe.

Since 1978, the Indonesian government has been actively relocating the tribe to several hamlets and villages. In Dodaga Village, the Indigenous community lived in the “Togutil Tribe Cultural Village,” but inadequate health care, poor educational facilities and a weak economy prevented the Indigenous population from thriving there. 

Although they received land and houses in the village, they had difficulty adapting to life there, while their nomadic hunting and gathering life, and ties within the O’Hongana Manyawa community, remained strong.

“We did get a house, but maybe they forgot that we also must find our own food every day,” said Sumean. “The house is very hot during the day and very cold at night because it uses a zinc roof. It is different from a leaf roof that can adjust to the season.”

The Indigenous population finally abandoned the village where they had been relocated, and it is now inhabited by immigrants from outside the area.

Although they objected to the mining and deforestation, their lives will continue to be disturbed until the government follows up on a Constitutional Court decision in 2012 concerning customary forests. Several institutions in Indonesia are now pushing the government to recognize Indigenous peoples’ rights to live in forest areas that they have controlled for two or three decades and to exercise their customary land rights there. A bill to do so has been stalled in parliament for more than 10 years.

Some hope emerged for Sumean and his friends when Tesla took a firm stance for Indigenous peoples in the 2023 Impact Report it published in May 2024. The electric car manufacturer owned by Elon Musk claims to have communicated with policymakers, nonprofit organizations and several parties involved in nickel mining and the mineral’s supply chain in Indonesia to discuss the possibility of implementing a no-go zone for mining that can protect the rights of uncontacted Indigenous peoples such as the O’Hongana Manyawa.

This would provide fixed boundaries for the industrial sector and mining companies so that they do not disturb the habitats of Indigenous peoples, according to Sophie Grig, senior researcher at Survival International, reducing their exposure to threats from outsiders like diseases or destruction of forest ecosystems on which they depend. This strategy has been implemented in several countries, including Brazil and Peru, and Grig deemed it “quite successful.” According to Grig, Tesla is strict in warning its suppliers not to take nickel ore from mining companies operating in Indigenous peoples’ territories.

Even so, the company has not yet provided any follow-up toward developing the mining-free areas recommended in the report. Tesla claims to acquire around 13 percent of its nickel ore from Indonesia. The energy transition is almost impossible without Indonesia’s nickel supplies. The company predicts that nickel production in Indonesia will continue to increase along with the rising demand for electric vehicles in the global market. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

A Nickel Rush in Indonesia

About a six-hour road trip from Dodaga Village, at the Indonesia Weda Industrial Park (IWIP), coal-fired power plants and nickel smelters replace the roadside forests. Thick smoke billows from chimneys without pause.

PT Weda Bay Nickel, a joint venture between the state-owned PT Aneka Tambang and Strand Minerals, began developing the area in 2020, eventually attracting French mining company Eramet and Tsingshan Holding Group, a Chinese company that specializes in stainless-steel and nickel, to join the collaboration. Over time, Tshingsan took 57 percent of Strand Minerals’ shares, and Eramet took the rest. The area has been part of Indonesia’s National Strategic Project, a country-wide economic plan, since November 2020 and is predicted to attract investment worth $15 billion.

The mountainous area on the north side of IWIP is rich in nickel, and the transition to renewable energy spiked interest in the area. The climate commitments made by signatories to the United Nations’ Paris Agreement are expected to increase the world’s nickel needs 60 percent by 2040.

Half of all new cars sold in China will be electric by the end of 2024, according to the International Energy Agency, as approximately 60 percent of plug-in vehicles sold there are currently cheaper than their gasoline-powered counterparts.

But nickel mining and smelting are not without environmental impacts. Twelve new coal-fired electricity plants power the smelters. Satellite imagery shows queues of trucks snaking along the road and heavy equipment digging into the hills beside it. The site is visible up to 10 kilometers away.

Geospatial analysis research conducted by Climate Rights International and the AI ​​Climate Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, revealed that nickel mining activities throughout the island of Halmahera have destroyed 5,331 hectares of tropical forest, releasing approximately 2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases that were sequestered by the trees, numbers that will increase with the demand for the metal.

In the IWIP industrial area, a provincial road separates the nickel mining and processing below the hills from facilities such as ports, power plants, offices and airports on the coast. Huts in nearby settlements house local residents and most of the workers who come from outside the Weda area. The operations employ about 43,000 people.

Garbage piles up outside the closely spaced, poorly ventilated huts, and road dust covers much of the vegetation. Since the mega project began operating four years ago, residents have complained of a steep increase in floods and landslides exacerbated by the deforestation for mining upstream on large rivers.

According to a July 2024 report from Jaringan Advokasi Tambang—the Mining Advocacy Network (JATAM), the frequency of floods with a height of more than 1 meter is increasing. Twelve occurred from August 2020 to June 2024. In July and August of 2024, a major flood in the Weda Bay mining area submerged seven villages and completely cut off vehicle access, forcing 1,670 residents into temporary refugee tents.

“Many houses were swept away, and yesterday there was another flood with the same effect,” said Ahmad Kruwet, 62, a migrant from Tegal who now lives in Woe Jarana, one of the flooded villages. “I think this is the effect because the forest upstream has been cut down until it is completely gone.” 

His house is still in disarray from being flooded in August, with a television and other damaged items piled high. Some of his livestock was swept away by the current.

“When the flood came, I only thought about saving myself,” he said. “I always made sure all the doors to the house were closed. Only then could I run to the mountain behind.” 

Ahmad said he can no longer drink the groundwater around his house. Since IWIP started operating, he said, he has had to buy gallons of water to meet his daily water needs.

In Lukolamo Village in Central Halmahera, Adrian Patapata, 64, said the water in his house became smelly and colored.

“Before, the water in our house was still clean and fresh. We drank with this water,” he said. After the mine opened, he said, they couldn’t use it. “We couldn’t even bathe.”

The bathroom and laundry area in his house were swept away by the flood that submerged his village for three days in July. A cocoa farmer, Adrian now keeps a tent on the hill behind his village that he and his family can run to during floods. A post there has been prepared as a meeting site for the evacuees.

The government provided basic necessities when the flood occurred, Ahmad said, and built embankments to hold back the water, but they could not withstand the heavy flooding and broke.

On August 13, floods inundated the highway around the village of Lelilef Waibulan, near the IWIP factory and smelter, forcing employees to rent a raft to get to work.

Cover photo: Sumean Gebe, from the O'Hongana Manyawa tribe, carries a Sulawesi bear cuscus after hunting on Aug. 19, 2024, in the dense forests of Halmahera, Indonesia.