PENAJAM PASER, Indonesia — Indonesia’s escalating wildfire crisis has reached the outskirts of Nusantara, the new capital city under construction as the world’s fourth-most-populous country seeks to transplant its political heartland from a flood plain in Java to the island of Borneo. Fires in mid-September burned 30 to 40 kilometers (19 to 25 miles) from the perimeter of government buildings. The fires were reported at Wonotirto, near the main toll road, and at Bukit Tengkorak in the Bukit Soeharto protected forest. These wildfires were in the outer zone designated for Nusantara, authorities in the new capital said, but had stopped short of the construction site of the government complex. “Hopefully, it won’t reoccur,” Danis H. Sumadilaga, Nusantara authority spokesperson, said in a Sept. 9 statement. “We will have to conduct monitoring and patrols to ensure this fire doesn’t happen again.” On Sept. 14, forestry minister Raja Juli Antoni traveled to inspect the fires, along with the head of Indonesia’s disaster management agency and the lead of Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN), the agency overseeing the new city, one of the world’s largest construction sites. Helicopters carrying giant buckets of water buzzed overhead as the officials surveyed the fragile landscape skirting the city. “It’s there again — where’s Manggala Agni?” the minister said, referring to the state fire brigade after spotting a suspected fire burning in the hills. “They need to get there, along with colleagues — there’s smoke again. “Please coordinate with the firefighters, army, police,” Raja Juli Antoni said on Sept. 14.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

JAKARTA — Two palm oil companies embroiled in a long-running land dispute with an Indigenous community in Indonesian Borneo have resumed the clearing of rainforest and other land to expand their plantations for the first time in more than a decade. In June 2025, the Indigenous Dayak Benuaq community of Muara Tae reported that the two companies — PT Borneo Surya Mining Jaya (BSMJ), owned by Singapore-listed First Resources, and PT Munte Waniq Jaya Perkasa (MWJP), a subsidiary of Malaysia-owned TSH Resources — had restarted land clearing and evictions in what the community says is its ancestral territory. The latest activities mark a new chapter in one of Indonesia’s highest-profile land conflicts involving the palm oil industry, which Mongabay covered in an in-depth report in 2015. Eviction activity using heavy equipment by PT BSMJ as of 2 June 2026 (c) Kaoem Telapak The dispute dates back to 2011-2012, when BSMJ and MWJP began bulldozing rainforest in an area claimed by Muara Tae, a village in West Kutai district, East Kalimantan province. The companies say they bought leasehold rights from residents of Muara Ponaq, a village next to Muara Tae. But Muara Tae has contended the companies colluded with individuals in Muara Ponaq who fraudulently signed away hundreds of hectares of Muara Tae’s communally held land, in exchange for hundreds of millions of rupiah. The district government facilitated the transactions by redrawing the Tae-Ponaq border, increasing the latter’s territory at the expense of the former. The district chief at the time,…This article was originally published on Mongabay