分类： environment

On the sun-scorched outskirts of Abu Khasaf village in Iraq’s Maysan governorate, a weathered, roofless concrete structure sits on Halima Flaih’s family plot, a quiet testament to both lost community joy and unyielding resistance. Two decades prior, Flaih, her husband, and their daughters hand-molded every concrete block, raised the walls, and plastered the interior to build a small gathering space where local Ma’adan (Marsh Arab) families would mark weddings, feasts, and community milestones. Today, the cracked, parched earth beneath the structure tells a grim broader story: the nearby UNESCO World Heritage-listed Hawizeh Marshes, a 7,000-year-old transboundary wetland straddling Iraq and Iran, is on the brink of total desiccation, driven by overlapping pressures of climate change, upstream dam construction, and state policies that critics explicitly prioritize oil extraction over the ecosystem’s survival.

Refusing to join the tens of thousands of displaced Marsh Arab families who have fled to overcrowded urban peripheries in recent years, Flaih and her family have embarked on a radical act of cultural preservation: converting the abandoned hand-built space into a tiny community micro-museum dedicated to safeguarding Ma’adan ancestral heritage. The planned collection will feature hand-woven reed bariya mats, traditional cotton fishing nets, and carved oars for the narrow mashoof canoes that once served as the community’s primary mode of transport. Far more than a static artifact display, the micro-museum is framed as a living archive to ensure future generations never forget the Ma’adan’s millennia-long symbiotic relationship with the wetlands, even if the water never returns to the parched landscape.

Once recognized by UNESCO as a global cradle of civilisation and critical biodiversity sanctuary, the Hawizeh Marshes have seen their ecological outlook plummet from “significant concern” in 2020 to “critical” – the IUCN’s highest threat rating – by 2025. Local research from the London School of Economics Middle East Centre confirms that a 2022 state-constructed earthen berm, officially marketed as a cross-border anti-smuggling measure, effectively cut off most natural water inflows to the wetlands, triggering a cascade of ecological collapse that displaced hundreds of families from four surrounding villages. Investigations from independent media outlets and civil society groups including Save the Tigris have further revealed that state-issued oil and gas concessions, including the 20-year HWZ 1 field awarded to Chinese firm Geo-Jade Petroleum in 2023, overlap 300 square kilometres of the UNESCO-protected core zone. Field operations for the concession began before a legally required environmental impact assessment was completed, and the full report has never been released to the public. Multiple official letters obtained by Middle East Eye confirm that Iraq’s state-run Oil Exploration Company requested permits to build 10-metre-wide access pathways and drill power points directly inside the protected zone, requests that the Water Resources Ministry later acknowledged fell within the UNESCO core boundary.

Iraqi government officials have repeatedly denied any causal link between oil development and marsh desiccation, claiming inter-ministerial monitoring teams enforce full compliance with environmental protections, and that emergency water tanker deployments meet local community needs. But on-the-ground realities starkly contradict these official statements. Local residents report government water tankers rarely make even token visits to remote villages, forcing families to pay up to $45 a day for private water deliveries to meet drinking needs and keep their dwindling herds of water buffalo alive. More than 140,000 people across central and southern Iraq have been displaced by environmental degradation since 2018, per International Organization for Migration 2024 data, with one fifth of Iraq’s total climate-displaced population hailing from Maysan governorate alone. Displaced families like Abu Qasim and Um Qasim, who lost their entire buffalo herd to drought in 2022, now eke out a marginal existence in overcrowded semi-urban settlements on the outskirts of Amarah city, facing social stigma from urban residents and losing access to the ancestral livelihoods – weaving reed mats, producing traditional clotted qaymar cream, and subsistence fishing – that defined Ma’adan life for generations.

Independent environmental experts warn that unregulated oil access roads and pipeline construction inside the marsh core risk permanently shattering the wetland’s fragile hydrological balance, creating stagnant dead zones and fragmenting critical fish spawning and wildlife habitats. Slow-decomposing oil contaminants trapped in the waterlogged anaerobic marsh soil could poison local groundwater for decades, making natural ecological recovery effectively impossible. Iraq’s status as the world’s 11th most polluted country in 2025, per IQAir data, is further exacerbated by massive gas flaring from southern oil fields that generates annual emissions equivalent to 22 million metric tonnes of CO2. UNESCO has issued formal warnings that the Hawizeh Marshes could be added to the List of World Heritage in Danger as early as 2027, calling on Iraqi authorities to implement an immediate permanent ban on all extractive activities inside the protected site. For Flaih and her remaining family, every day they stay on their parched land is a deliberate act of resistance. Her 23-year-old son Mustafa commutes two hours round-trip to a low-wage power plant job in Amarah to cover the family’s exorbitant water costs, while her husband Hashem has lost more than half of his 20-head buffalo herd to thirst and disease. Even as their traditional livelihoods fade, the family remains determined to complete their small micro-museum, ensuring the Ma’adan’s ancient, water-centered way of life is never erased from collective memory.

The catastrophic flood disaster that has struck southern Nepal near the Tibet border has already claimed more than 1,000 lives, sending a urgent transboundary warning that stretches far beyond Nepal’s national boundaries. As hydrological and climate experts emphasize, Nepal and India share an interconnected network of Himalayan river systems, and the link between upstream flooding in Nepal and downstream disaster in India is far more complex than the simple narrative of water flowing south across the border.

Nepal is home to more than 6,000 rivers and streams, the vast majority of which drain southward into India’s Ganges river basin. Four major transboundary systems dominate the region: the Kosi in eastern Nepal, the Gandaki (known as Gandak in India) in central Nepal, the Karnali (called Ghaghara in India) in western Nepal, and the Mahakali (Sharda) that runs along the two countries’ western border. Dozens of smaller rivers, including the Bagmati, Kamala, Rapti, and Babai that originate in Nepal’s Siwalik and Chure hill ranges, are far less well known but pose outsized risk: their small, steep catchment areas produce far faster, more unpredictable flash floods that can catch communities off guard.

Manish Shrestha, a hydrologist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), confirms that between 7 to 9 major river systems flow from Nepal into India’s northern plains, and these systems are the primary source of flood hazards across northern India. India’s Central Water Commission formally lists the Kosi, Gandak, Bagmati, and Ghaghara as the highest-risk transboundary watercourses.

Among Indian states, Bihar is by far the most vulnerable to cross-border floods, with approximately 75% of northern Bihar officially designated as flood-prone territory. Nearly every major river that floods the state originates in Nepal, with the Kosi—long infamously known as the “sorrow of Bihar”—toping the list of high-risk systems, followed by the Gandak, Bagmati, and Kamala. But the hazard extends far beyond Bihar’s borders: eastern Uttar Pradesh is regularly impacted by flooding from the Ghaghara, Rapti, and Gandak rivers, with districts including Gorakhpur, Bahraich, Lakhimpur Kheri, and Shravasti facing repeated disaster. Uttarakhand shares the Mahakali-Sharda river system with Nepal, while North Bengal receives floodwaters from the Mechi and Mahananda. Pradeep Man Dangol, another ICIMOD hydrologist, notes that while Bihar bears the largest scale of flood risk, Uttar Pradesh is the second most affected and its vulnerability is chronically underreported.

Hydrologists break down transboundary flood risk into a clear three-stage chain of causality. First, the rainfall: flood peaks that reach Indian territory are most often generated not in the high Himalayas, but in the lower elevation Siwalik, Chure, and Terai regions, where intense monsoon downpours fall on steep, small catchments that can channel massive volumes of water downstream very quickly. Second, the river itself: after rushing out of the mountains, Nepal’s rivers hit a sharp break in slope at the mountain front, drop their heavy sediment load, and spread across the plains as wide, braided, constantly shifting channels. Third, when the water crosses into India, the final severity of the disaster depends entirely on local conditions: how much rain has fallen on the Indian side, the existing water level of the Ganges, the condition of embankments and barrages, and how much natural drainage has been blocked by roads, railways, and expanding settlements on the floodplain.

To put this simply: while the volume of flood flow arriving at the Indo-Nepal border is determined primarily by rainfall in Nepal, the ultimate severity of flooding depends at least as much on local conditions in India. The 2008 Kosi disaster offers a clear illustration of this dynamic. When the Kosi breached an embankment in Nepal and flooded large swathes of Bihar, killing nearly 400 people, the event was not caused by an unprecedented high-flow event. According to Rajiv Sinha, a professor of earth sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, the actual river flow during the 2008 event was only around one-tenth of the channel’s designed carrying capacity. The catastrophe was triggered by a breach in decades-old embankments that had never been properly maintained. “The embankments constructed in the 1950s and 1960s had not been properly maintained. They had become eroded and eventually developed a weak point. The river breached its embankment through these vulnerable points and entered parts of India that had not seen flooding for perhaps 100 years,” Sinha explained. Saswata Sanyal, ICIMOD’s intervention manager for disaster risk reduction, summarizes this failure: “The failure was structural, not hydrological.”

For routine monsoon floods, India typically receives between 12 hours and two days of advance warning before floodwaters arrive, depending on how quickly water travels downstream. It takes roughly one full day for floodwaters to travel from the Nepal mountain front to the Bihar plains along the Kosi and Gandak, and slightly longer for the Ghaghara. Flash floods from the steep Chure hill rivers can arrive in just a few hours, and surges from landslide dam bursts or debris flows move even faster: during the 2026 Nepal floods, the peak flood surge from Rasuwa reached the Indian border near Triveni in just seven and a half hours.

Currently, India and Nepal do share real-time rainfall and river level data through a network of monitoring stations, with Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology sharing data with India’s Central Water Commission to support flood forecasting. But experts warn that critical gaps remain in the existing cooperation framework. There are far too few real-time monitoring stations in the fast-flowing Chure catchments that produce the most dangerous flash floods. The two countries also do not have a single shared cross-border flood forecasting model, and there is limited routine information sharing on embankment conditions, shifting river channels, and sediment buildup. Even when forecasts are successful, gaps remain in the “last mile” of warning delivery: a notification reaching a district government office does not guarantee that at-risk families in rural floodplains receive the warning in time to evacuate.

Scientists are also eager to correct a common public misconception: the idea that Nepal intentionally “releases” floodwater into India. Nepal has almost no large-scale reservoirs capable of storing and releasing large volumes of water; the country’s largest storage dam, the Kulekhani, holds less than one-tenth of a cubic kilometre of water, far too little to create a large-scale flood. “So there’s nothing to release,” Sanyal says. In fact, the Kosi and Gandak barrages that regulate flow along the border are operated by India, not Nepal. When floodwater crosses the border, it is almost entirely the result of heavy rainfall upstream, not deliberate gate openings by Nepal.

That said, the basic fact remains: the majority of floodwater that hits northern Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh originates as rain in Nepal, so Nepal’s rainfall patterns set the timing and size of flood peaks that reach India. Overall, Nepal supplies roughly 40% of the Ganges’ average annual flow, and a far larger share during the dry season, making Nepal’s hydrology critical to India’s water security and flood risk. But experts emphasize that blaming Nepal for downstream floods is overly simplistic. “Rain is not a decision,” Sanyal points out. Whether a given flow becomes a disaster depends on conditions in India as much as Nepal: the Ganges’ baseline water level, local rainfall, embankment integrity, drainage infrastructure, and sediment buildup.

Crucially, the impacts of water management on one side of the border also affect the other: infrastructure like embankments and barrages built for flood protection in India have raised upstream water levels and caused backwater flooding in Nepal’s Terai region, a longstanding concern for Nepali authorities. Since Nepal and India share a single integrated river system, with one country positioned upstream and the other downstream, the solution to growing flood risk is not blame, but expanded cross-border cooperation on data sharing, joint forecasting, and integrated river basin management.

Experts note that the 2026 Nepal flood disaster carries a broader warning beyond transboundary management: it highlights the growing risk of extreme, debris-laden catastrophic flood events driven by climate change across the entire Himalayan region. Sinha points out that the 2026 Nepal disaster follows a pattern of similar catastrophic events that have struck India in recent years, including the 2021 Chamoli disaster and the 2025 Dharali disaster in Uttarakhand, and the 2026 Nepal event was between five to 10 times larger than those earlier disasters.

“The fundamental point is that these are not normal hydrological floods,” Sinha explains. Conventional floods are composed almost entirely of water, but these new extreme events mix intense rainfall, melting glacial ice, or sudden glacial lake discharge with massive volumes of rock and sediment, creating a thick, high-energy debris slurry that can destroy almost every structure in its path. This was exactly what happened during the 2021 Chamoli disaster, when a large section of a Himalayan glacier collapsed, sending a debris and water cascade downstream that killed more than 200 people and destroyed major hydropower infrastructure. The same dynamic was seen in the 2025 Dharali disaster, where heavy rain triggered a flash flood that buried large parts of a village under meters of rock and sediment.

Climate change is amplifying these risks across the board. Experts confirm that extreme rainfall events are intensifying across the Himalayan region, which is warming faster than the global average. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, leading the monsoon to deliver more total rain in fewer, more intense downpours. High mountain hazards are also growing: as permafrost degrades, glacial lake outburst events and rock-ice avalanches are projected to become more common, creating faster, debris-heavy floods that are far harder to forecast. More extreme events also trigger more landslides, adding larger volumes of sediment to rivers, which raises riverbeds and reduces channel capacity on both sides of the border. All these hazards are part of a single interconnected Himalayan risk system, and India’s exposure to these events is very significant.

High in Nepal’s remote Himalayan villages, Pema Tamang’s life was upended once again last week when a towering surge of water, rock and mud ripped through her community. In a stroke of fate, she and her neighbors found safe refuge in a Buddhist stupa that had only been reconstructed 12 months earlier, after being leveled by the devastating 2015 Nepal earthquake. The harrowing escape is just one example of the relentless cycle of disaster now gripping the world’s highest mountain range, driven by accelerating glacial melt tied to climate change.

The catastrophic flash floods on August 26 have left more than 1,000 people dead across Nepal and neighboring China, with thousands more still unaccounted for. Hundreds of those missing are feared trapped inside tunnels at under-construction hydropower projects, where rushing debris and water swept through work sites. The disaster was triggered when a massive block of glacial ice and bedrock collapsed, sending a destructive surge cascading through multiple river systems that cut through the Himalayan slopes.

While scientists caution it is too early to draw a direct causal link between this specific extreme event and anthropogenic global warming, the broader trend is unambiguous. As planetary temperatures rise faster than ever due to the continued burning of fossil fuels, the likelihood of similar catastrophic events increases dramatically — especially across the Himalayas, a region that is warming far faster than the global average.

“Climate change has been playing a large role in the Hindu Kush Himalayas, causing these kinds of complex disasters which have really impacted downstream communities and investments,” explained Saswata Sanyal, a disaster risk resilience specialist based at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Kathmandu. Sanyal notes the region is now facing a growing pattern of interconnected hazards: rising temperatures melt high-altitude ice, which in turn triggers more frequent rockslides, avalanches, and outburst floods. An avalanche can temporarily block a river before releasing a catastrophic flash flood, while unseasonal heavy rainfall can compound destruction after an initial disaster.

This cycle of back-to-back disasters is already wearing down local communities. Flash floods in the same region of Nepal last year killed nine people and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Across the wider Hindu Kush Himalayan region, a string of deadly events including the 2013 Kedarnath floods, 2021 Chamoli disaster, and 2023 South Lhonak glacial lake outburst flood have killed thousands of people and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in total damage. “People in Nepal were still recovering from last year’s floods, and before they could fully adapt, the next one came,” Sanyal added.

Spanning eight countries across South and Central Asia, the Hindu Kush Himalaya holds the largest volume of ice outside the Earth’s polar regions, and its river systems supply water to nearly 2 billion people across the continent. Data from Sanyal’s intergovernmental climate research group confirms glacial ice loss in the region has accelerated sharply since 2000. Beyond glacial melt, thawing permafrost — long-frozen ground that is now warming — is weakening mountain slopes, increasing the risk of catastrophic collapse.

Analysis of satellite imagery from last week’s collapse confirms a massive block of glacial ice and bedrock plunged into the valley below, generating a wall of mud and water several stories high that traveled for kilometers downstream, wiping out entire communities in its path.

Climate experts warn that for the most at-risk high-altitude communities, adaptation has already reached its limits. In some locations, the frequency and severity of disasters have become so extreme that rebuilding villages and infrastructure is no longer practical, forcing mass relocation of long-standing communities. The crisis also casts new uncertainty over regional development plans focused on building roads, bridges, and hydropower projects to lift local economies.

“The adaptation threshold has been crossed in some areas,” said Manjeet Dhakal, a Nepali climate policy expert and United Nations climate negotiator. Dhakal explained that unlike earthquakes, which often leave property and land salvageable, catastrophic floods can erase entire settlements: they destroy not just homes, but the underlying land, public infrastructure including roads, water grids, schools, and power networks. Going forward, he said, all planned resettlement projects must integrate climate risk assessment from their earliest stages.

Dhakal added that the catastrophic consequences of these disasters can be reduced through targeted action: stricter land-use regulations that bar development in high-risk zones, more rigorous multi-hazard assessments before approving new infrastructure, expanded cross-border disaster monitoring, and more accessible, effective early warning systems.

Even with early warning systems in place, however, gaps remain. Of the 670,000 people who received text alert warnings for the August 26 floods, many were migrant workers or tourists who could not read Nepali, while others dismissed the risk as overstated. Some river monitoring stations were overwhelmed by the surge or washed away entirely before they could transmit updated data. Chanda Lal Chitrakar, a 62-year-old resident of Nuwakot, told the Associated Press he paid little attention to the warning he received, only fleeing uphill when he saw the waters rising.

Experts say warnings need to be more actionable, clearly outlining what steps people should take to get to safety. They also recommend prioritizing development in lower-risk regions, retrofitting existing infrastructure to withstand multiple hazards, and centering Indigenous traditional knowledge of local terrain and disaster patterns in formal planning.

For Nepal and other low-emission Himalayan nations, the disaster underscores a profound climate injustice. Nepal accounts for less than 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change, yet it faces some of the most severe and frequent impacts. “We should blame those who are responsible for increasing the global temperature, those who have benefited from the fossil fuel economy for such a long time,” Dhakal said. “We can at least use this devastating example as an inspiration to urgently reduce carbon emissions.”

This reporting was produced by the Associated Press, with climate coverage supported by private philanthropic foundations. AP maintains full editorial control over all content, with public transparency standards for philanthropic partnerships available on AP.org.

As India grapples with soaring summer power demand driven by record-breaking heat, a striking contradiction has emerged at the heart of its clean energy transition: the world’s fastest-growing solar market is regularly forced to shut down working renewable capacity even when the nation desperately needs more electricity.

When temperatures peaked across the South Asian giant this year, extended air conditioner use through hotter nights pushed evening power grids to their limits. Yet behind the strain, data shows renewable energy providers were ordered to throttle output, as existing transmission networks lacked the capacity to safely absorb the excess clean electricity being generated. Over the last 15 months alone, India has curtailed nearly 11 terawatt-hours of solar generation, according to analysis from global energy think tank Ember and official government data. To put that volume in perspective, that wasted clean power is enough to supply roughly 10 million average households with electricity for a full year. The waste comes at a time when extreme heat and below-average monsoon rains have driven up demand nationwide, for both home cooling and agricultural groundwater pumping.

As the planet’s most populous country and one of the top global emitters of greenhouse gases, India has made rapid progress expanding renewable energy, particularly utility-scale solar, to decarbonize its power sector. It now boasts more than 300 gigawatts of installed clean energy capacity, accounting for over half of the nation’s total installed electricity capacity. Despite that milestone, coal still generates the majority of India’s electricity, and systemic bottlenecks prevent the country from utilizing all the clean power it can produce. Energy analysts say these bottlenecks represent the next major barrier to India’s goal of becoming a global leader in low-carbon energy growth.

The core barriers fall into three interconnected categories: insufficient long-distance transmission infrastructure, inadequate grid-scale energy storage, and the inflexibility of existing coal-fired power plants that dominate baseload supply. When solar generation peaks in bright midday afternoons, coal units cannot quickly ramp down output to make room for the excess clean power. Unlike natural gas or hydro facilities that can adjust output rapidly, coal plants are engineered for steady operation; ramping them down too quickly compromises operational efficiency, raises costs, and even raises risks of mechanical failure. Vinay Pabba, CEO of Hyderabad-based renewable energy developer Vibrant Energy, describes the challenge of adapting rigid coal infrastructure to variable renewable supply as “like asking an elephant to dance.”

Curtailment does more than waste carbon-free power: it creates direct financial losses for renewable energy developers, who only earn revenue for the electricity they actually deliver to the grid. Geographic concentration has worsened the problem too: nearly half of India’s total solar capacity is located in the western states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, leading to rapid transmission congestion when solar output hits its daily peak. “When solar peaks, usually in the afternoon, there is a limited pipe to evacuate it,” Pabba explained.

Without adequate storage to hold excess solar generation for peak evening demand, India also risks locking in continued reliance on fossil fuels even when cheap clean power is available. “Without enough storage, India risks keeping coal plants running even when cheap renewable power is available,” noted Vibhuti Garg, South Asia director for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

Infrastructure timelines have compounded the gap: utility-scale solar and wind farms can often be completed in as little as two years, but new long-distance transmission lines require a minimum of three years of planning, permitting and construction. Ember research finds that India has only hit roughly 80% of its annual transmission construction targets over the past five years, leaving a growing backlog of grid expansion that cannot keep pace with new renewable capacity.

Policy experts have proposed near-term fixes to ease the strain, including spreading new renewable development more evenly across different regions of India, and increasing investment in smaller distributed solar projects and onshore wind to balance output across the day. Even with these adjustments, analysts warn the challenge will grow more acute as India continues its rapid buildout of clean capacity.

India has set ambitious decarbonization targets: the country aims to reach 500 gigawatts of total clean energy capacity by 2030, and policymakers project that non-fossil fuels will account for nearly 70% of total installed power capacity by 2036. To meet these goals without continued waste and grid instability, energy leaders say expanded grid-scale energy storage will be a critical piece of the puzzle.

Batteries allow grid operators to store surplus solar electricity generated during sunny afternoon hours, then discharge that power after sunset when demand remains high but solar output drops to zero. A recent study from the University of California, Berkeley’s India Energy and Climate Center found that renewable power paired with battery storage can match the reliability of conventional coal-fired power, at a lower cost than building new coal plants. Despite that cost advantage, India’s current storage sector remains a fraction of the size needed to meet 2030 targets. As of July this year, India had only 3 gigawatts of operational battery storage and 7.4 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage, with national projected storage demand expected to hit 74 gigawatts by 2032.

“If we try to increase the solar installations without solving for energy storage, it is only going to lead to curtailment,” said Ankit Mittal, CEO of Indian battery storage firm Ingro Energy. Mittal noted that India is navigating an unprecedented, compressed energy transition, with decades-worth of transformation compressed into just a few years as power demand surges from growing electrification of transportation, industry and data centers.

Avinash Rao, CEO of leading Indian renewable developer Mahindra Susten, warned that delayed investment in high-capacity energy storage creates dual risks: it adds operational instability to the national grid and slows progress toward India’s national climate and energy transition targets. Ember analyst Neshwin Rodrigues noted that batteries have a key advantage over large transmission projects: they can be built far faster, making them one of the quickest solutions to ease immediate curtailment pressures.

Across the industry, stakeholders agree that the current crunch was largely unforeseen. Few expected the explosive growth in power demand that has come alongside rapid electrification of new sectors across India. “None of us saw it coming. If we had seen it coming, we would have probably planned our way around it,” Pabba said.

The ongoing Iran war has sent shockwaves through the global aluminum market, disrupting regional supply chains and opening an unexpected window of opportunity for resource-rich Indonesia to dramatically scale up its production of the ubiquitous industrial metal. But the Southeast Asian nation’s ambitious expansion plan, powered almost entirely by newly built coal-fired facilities, stands in direct contradiction to global and national pledges to cut carbon emissions and curb the worst effects of climate change.

Aluminum, a lightweight silver metal used in everything from consumer packaging and power transmission infrastructure to smartphones and electric vehicles, has long relied on the Middle East for roughly 9% of global annual output. Commodities analytics firm Fastmarkets projects that regional production will plummet by 44% this year compared to pre-conflict 2025 levels, driven by widespread energy shortages, Iranian strikes that damaged key industrial facilities in Bahrain, and production cuts across major producers including Qatar Aluminium Ltd. Emirates Global Aluminium has even been forced to exit existing supply deals amid persistent energy instability.

This supply shock has sent global aluminum prices swinging: prior to the outbreak of the war, a metric ton of aluminum traded between $3,150 and $3,250, peaking at $3,780 per metric ton in June before settling at around $3,400 in recent trading. Andy Farida of Fastmarkets explained that the uncertainty around Middle Eastern supply has forced industrial end-users to seek alternative sources, accelerating a global shift in aluminum production that has catapulted Indonesia into a new role as a major global supplier. “When that supply is so unsure, end users look for alternatives,” Farida said. “The war has really accelerated this transformation and put Indonesia on the map.”

Indonesia’s expansion targets are aggressive: according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), a Finland-based non-profit research organization, the country aims to quadruple its alumina output to 32.5 million metric tons by the end of the decade, and ramp up primary aluminum production from roughly 1 million metric tons in 2025 to 14.5 million metric tons by 2030. Unlike many decarbonization-focused production projects, however, nearly all new Indonesian smelters will be powered by dedicated off-grid coal-fired power plants, referred to as “captive coal” facilities. CREA is currently tracking 32 planned captive coal projects exclusively built to power aluminum smelters, most of which are developed by private companies.

Syahdiva Moezbar, a Jakarta-based researcher with CREA, noted that there is a striking lack of public emissions data for these facilities, creating a largely unmonitored expansion of highly polluting energy infrastructure. “This captive coal boom all over Indonesia is essentially not tracked. That is why it’s very concerning,” Moezbar said. The plan directly contradicts Indonesia’s existing international pledges to phase out coal, the most carbon-intensive major fossil fuel and a leading driver of global warming. It also mirrors the environmental tradeoffs already seen in Indonesia’s rapid expansion of its nickel industry, where widespread deforestation and ecosystem degradation have been traded for rapid industrial growth.

The global aluminum industry already accounts for roughly 2% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions, equal to around 1.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year — more than the total annual emissions of most entire countries, according to the World Economic Forum. Even more concerning, CREA estimates that if all planned Indonesian projects come online by 2030, the country’s domestic bauxite ore reserves, the core raw material for aluminum production, will be depleted in less than 12 years.

Indonesia’s aluminum boom would not be possible without major Chinese investment. CREA data shows Chinese firms have already poured between $5.5 billion and $6 billion into Indonesia’s aluminum sector, with total investment projected to surge to $30 billion by 2030. Putra Adhiguna, a researcher with the Jakarta-based Energy Shift Institute, explained that Chinese investment flows follow a decade-old policy shift: after Beijing imposed a domestic cap on aluminum production in 2017 to curb overcapacity and cut domestic pollution, Chinese firms began shifting high-emission smelting operations to countries with looser environmental regulations, including Indonesia.

Indonesia classifies aluminum and nickel as “transition minerals” due to their widespread use in clean energy technologies such as electric vehicle batteries and solar panels. This classification creates a critical regulatory loophole that allows coal-powered production projects to be framed as consistent with global climate commitments — even despite Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2021 pledge to halt public funding for overseas coal-fired power projects. Binbin Mariana, a policy analyst with environmental advocacy group Market Forces, called this loophole extraordinarily large, saying the framing of coal-powered aluminum as a green product amounts to blatant greenwashing. “It is a huge loophole, an elephant can go through the loophole,” Mariana said. “You say it’s a green product, but it is powered by coal… That’s definitely greenwashing.”

While aluminum smelting can run on lower-emission energy sources such as hydropower, building that renewable infrastructure would require more time and larger upfront investment. Adhiguna said Indonesia has chosen to prioritize speed to capitalize on the supply opportunity created by the Iran war, and that rush to develop is the root of much of the environmental and social risk. “The speed factor is really what is causing the havoc,” Adhiguna said. “This is really running against the grain, against the spirit, of the commitment to the climate movement.”

Muhammad Al Amin, a senior official with WALHI, Indonesia’s largest environmental advocacy nonprofit, warned that expanding captive coal capacity for aluminum will worsen the toxic seasonal haze that regularly blankets major Southeast Asian cities including Jakarta. WALHI has already led campaigns against coal expansion on Sulawesi, the island at the center of Indonesia’s nickel production boom, where local communities have already reported widespread health and livelihood impacts from coal-powered industrial development. “If companies want to expand captive coal to aluminum, I think it is very bad news and a very bad development,” Al Amin said. “We have seen it, we have felt it — how communities suffer from the captive coal impact.”

Across the rainforests of Borneo, an ecological disaster is unfolding as rampant wildfires sweep through one of the only remaining habitats of the critically endangered Bornean orangutan. Indonesia, the nation that hosts the vast majority of Borneo’s old-growth rainforest, is currently battling a wave of uncontrolled blazes that have already torn through thousands of hectares of native forest.

For the island’s orangutan population, the damage extends far beyond immediate loss of life from the fires themselves. Hundreds of the great apes have already seen their natural territories turned to ash, destroying the food sources, shelter, and social structures that the species depends on for long-term survival.

Conservation scientists have warned that this new wave of habitat destruction comes at a moment when Bornean orangutans were already struggling to recover from decades of deforestation driven by logging, palm oil expansion, and previous fire events. With fewer than 100,000 orangutans left in the wild globally, every hectare of lost habitat and every displaced individual pushes the species closer to permanent extinction.

The fires, which are often intentionally set to clear land for agricultural development, have been exacerbated in recent years by longer, hotter dry seasons linked to human-caused climate change. This combination of land clearing and changing weather patterns has created a vicious cycle that increasingly threatens not just orangutans, but the entire unique Borneo rainforest ecosystem, which supports thousands of other endemic plant and animal species.