‘The last frontier’: how red globules of nickel ore are suffocating an island’s precious wilderness

In the race to meet the demands of the energy transition, biodiversity hotspots such as Palawan in the Philippines are being increasingly mined for critical elements

Moharen Tahil Tambiling lowers himself from the fishing boat into the water and gingerly picks his way over the reef circling the bay. At low tide here in Brooke’s Point on Palawan, a long, rugged island in the south-west of the Philippines archipelago, the coral is just under the surface, and it looms suddenly under the waves, scraping at the boat’s wooden hull.

Beneath his feet are brain-like mounds and curling fingers of coral. Leaning over the side of the fishing boat, the men point out different kinds: some which were once vibrant orange and others that should be delicate pink. Now, almost everything is the same dull khaki, covered by a thick film of silt. Another man jumps overboard, stirring the sediment. A cloud rises like thick smoke over the reef.

Plunging his hands into the water, Tambiling, a farmer and Indigenous leader from the nearby village, draws up a thick, viscous clump of goop: grey threaded with orange. “Laterite,” he says, his face set in a grim line against the drizzle.

Wading over to the long band of sand alongside the reef, he uses a flip-flop to gouge the surface. Under a thin crust of grey, the scuff comes up bright, telltale orange. “See? Laterite,” he says again, shaking his head.

This is nickel laterite: a red ore that forms close to the surface of the Earth’s crust. Laterite deposits are created by intense humidity and tropical weathering of rock – and so they form in the tropics, often in hotspots for biodiversity and rich, intact rainforests.

These deposits account for about 70% of the world’s reserves of nickel, a mineral now in high demand for manufacturing batteries, especially for electric cars and clean energy infrastructure.

That demand has brought international mining companies to Palawan. Even in a country scattered with tropical rainforests and coral reefs, the island is regarded as special. Environmental groups estimate it may hold close to half of all the Philippines’ remaining untouched, old-growth forest, as well as 30% of its remaining mangroves and up to 40% of its coral reefs.

The island is known locally as “the last ecological frontier” – a reservoir of wilderness where extraordinary wildlife and rich biodiversity have been shielded from human expansion, deforestation and extraction. Minibuses in Puerto Princesa, Palawan’s largest city, are emblazoned with a shorter version: “The Last Frontier”.

In 2015, the mining company Global Ferronickel Holdings bought Ipilan Nickel Corp, and its rights to a huge deposit on Mt Mantalingahan, one of the island’s protected areas, behind Brooke’s Point. It is one of 11 established, active mining projects dotted over Palawan, which were exempted from a 2025 moratorium on mining expansion. Viewed from above, the Ipilan mine has carved a large, deep red gash into the mountain.

Rather than being contained by the open pit, however, local communities say it has sent tendrils of contamination into the delicate ecosystems that surround it. You can now scoop red globules of laterite silt from the rice fields, from the sheltered, slow-running curves of the riverbed and from the reef, which was once thronged with fish and crustaceans.

Roddy Masap, a thin, spry man of 58, crouches at the boat’s tip as his workmate guns the engine. He has been fishing here “since I was born”, he says.

Masap noticed fish were disappearing from this bay about four years ago – shortly after the mine expanded, and shipped out its first 50,000 tonnes of nickel ore to China. Once, he says, a good day would bring in 40kg (88lb) of fish. Now, their catch is often as little as 7kg.

“There used to be fish near the shore, but now we can’t get fish here – we have to go out deep into the sea,” he says. They once made most of their income from small crayfish, caught using a river stone drilled with holes. Now the traps come up dripping with silt. The holes where crayfish nest are clogged with laterite mud – “this colour”, Roddy says, tapping a brightly painted orange panel on the boat.

One vital step toward addressing the climate crisis is finding alternatives to fossil fuels. But clean energy has massive demands of its own: batteries, magnets and wires, which in turn require minerals such as copper, rare earths, lithium and nickel.

According to modelling, using clean energy to limit global heating to 1.5C (2.7F) above preindustrial levels would require almost 300 new mines by 2030, extracting minerals with a market value of close to $800bn (£600bn) by 2040. Many of those new mines are concentrated in a belt of places that contain the world’s most precious reservoirs of biodiversity and habitat.

In the race to meet the demands of the energy transition, “we are seeing for the first time, in real time, where the geographies of extraction may take place”, says Olivia Lazard, a Carnegie fellow researching the limits within which the Earth can sustain human civilisations. “Essentially, they’re pushing against the last natural frontiers of the world.”

Extraction is rapidly eating into places previously preserved by isolation, lack of infrastructure and challenging terrain, such as Palawan. Prospectors and mining companies are tunnelling deep into the old-growth rainforests of the Congo basin, Indonesia and the Amazon.

Analysis produced for the Guardian by academics found more than 3,267 instances of mining within key biodiversity areas, accounting for nearly 5% of the sector’s global footprint. Miners are digging in locations never previously occupied by humans, such as the tabletop tepuis mountains of Venezuela – earthbound “islands” more than 1,000 metres high, where unique species have evolved in isolation over millennia.

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At the edge of the rice fields that Tambiling tends, an enormous mountain of red dirt rears up. This is one of the mining company’s stockpiles of mined nickel. A road, stained bright orange by spilled ore, cuts through the paddies, carrying a constant flow of trucks from the mountain and stockpiles to ships waiting in the bay.

The pile of ore is ringed by a pond designed to hold runoff. When rains are heavy, however, local people say it sends orange liquid out into the paddies.

Wading through the paddy fields, Tambiling sends a snake skittering off into the grass. He dips his hand into the water and holds it up, stained orange by a thick coating of laterite. “Rice doesn’t grow properly here any more,” he says. “The plants die.”

The family’s rice yields have dropped steadily since the mine started operating, he says. But Tambiling worries about other effects, too. He and his family get painful, itchy rashes after contact with the silt, he says, and his nieces and nephews have developed long-term coughs since the stockpile was built.

Wading through the paddy fields, Tambiling sends a snake skittering off into the grass. He dips his hand into the water and holds it up, stained orange by a thick coating of laterite. “Rice doesn’t grow properly here any more,” he says. “The plants die.”

The family’s rice yields have dropped steadily since the mine started operating, he says. But Tambiling worries about other effects, too. He and his family get painful, itchy rashes after contact with the silt, he says, and his nieces and nephews have developed long-term coughs since the stockpile was built.

“They said that mining will have no effect on the rice fields, that there’s no effect or damage to the health of the people, that the environment will not be damaged,” Tambiling says. Now, he says, once-familiar wildlife has become rarer – and some native species he does not see at all.

Follow the river up, towards the mountain, and the forest thickens and the water turns blue-white, surging down the slope. Tambiling walks up the hill, accompanied by Nelson Sombra, an Indigenous leader who has also spent years documenting the effects of the mine. As he walks, Sombra pauses to point out plants used for medicine or food.

At one point, he slices through a thick, bamboo-like stalk, and lifts it to drip the liquid sap in Tambiling’s eyes. “Eyedropper,” he says. “The forest is our supermarket and pharmacy.

“In this area, the biodiversity is still intact. We can see wild boar, hornbills, talking mynahs, Palawan bearcat, pangolin.

“The mining company can give us all the money in the world,” says Sombra, “but once the mountain is gone, they cannot buy it back.”

In a written statement, the mining company says “no evidence or direct link exists between our nickel stockpiles and any adverse impacts on the crops, rivers or marine environments” of the area. The region is flood-prone, with laterite soil that underwent “natural soil erosion” in heavy rains, they say.

They add that “environmental changes are driven by climate-related events and are independent of mining operations”. The company says it has a strict drainage system to protect water quality and that sampling conducted by government agencies in the rice fields has not detected laterite.

The mining sector typically argues that its actual footprint is relatively small – less than 1% of the Earth’s surface – particularly compared with other sectors destroying global wilderness, such as farming. But the effects of a mine are often felt far beyond their immediate borders.

Nickel laterite is mined through an open pit: forest must be cleared and topsoil removed, along with its networks of fungi, microbes and seeds. Local communities say that with trees and soil gone, there is less to hold the water on the mountain. Sediment from the mine, they say, is contaminating and clogging nearby rivers and seabeds, and contributing to floods.

In 2024, the Philippines’ local coastal and fisheries department commissioned divers to inspect the seabed at Brooke’s Point. The internal report, which has been viewed by the Guardian, found that at the mine’s dock in the bay, dead coral was the predominant form of sea-floor cover. At the mining dock, all soft coral was gone.

The mining company says its own sea sampling continues to show a variety of fish, and that its mine is not damaging the marine ecosystem.

A mine can often be the first push into isolated forest. It can bring infrastructure and workers deep into pristine habitats; roads built to transport minerals out also provide access for loggers, hunters and farmers.

“I have seen what happens in other parts of the island when logging and mining is allowed in,” says Sombra. “Suddenly, you look at the mountain and everything has been cut down.”

Protecting Palawan from those effects is crucial, says Grizelda Mayo-Anda, a lawyer based on the island who founded the Environmental Legal Assistance Center, which defends environmental causes and has represented indigenous groups in a case against the mine.

“There are about 17 countries that support around 70% of the world’s biodiversity,” she says, one of which is the Philippines. “In that context, Palawan plays a very significant and, of course, critical role as an ecological frontier, [not only] to maintain our mega-diversity standing, but to maintain the world’s biodiversity.”

Faced with enormous global losses of biodiversity, some scientists are asking whether these places should be off limits, set aside and protected for the outsize role they play in maintaining planetary health, such as storing carbon, hosting diverse species and distributing water.

“Are there certain places that are small, yet ecologically significant enough to have knock-on effects at a planetary level?” Lazard asks. “Can we afford to make up for those losses?”

Since the early days of Ipilan’s operations in Palawan, communities have protested about its environmental impact. In 2018, the mayor revoked its licence to operate, alleging that the company was felling old-growth forests.

The supreme court of the Philippines issued a writ saying it was possible the mine could be causing “serious and irreversible harm” to the environment and inhabitants. In 2023, the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples issued the mining company with a cease-and-desist order to stop its operations. The mining company has successfully challenged and overturned all shutdown measures. After demonstrators blocked the hauling road leading to the mine, Moharen, Sobra and 22 other Indigenous activists have been sued by the mining company for more than 10 million pesos (£125,000). The mining company alleges that villagers were involved in trespassing and the takeover of premises, and alleges that some threw stones at guards. The suit represents an almost unimaginable sum for the family, who lives in a house built of woven bamboo, with no running water or electricity. “We have nothing – we do not have 10 million pesos,” Moharen says.

 

Cover photo:  Tribal leader Moharen Tahil Tambiling walks through a dead coral reef covered with laterite tailings