Philip Jacobson

1 week ago | southafricatoday.net | Philip Jacobson

A joint venture between Indonesia and state-owned Malaysia companies is constructing a network of dams in the Bulungan and Malinau districts of North Kalimantan, a sparsely populated Bornean province bordering the Malaysian state of Sarawak. The dams will generate 9,000 megawatts to power industry in the under-construction Kalimantan Industrial Park Indonesia in Bulungan district, a site the government hopes will be a global hub of solar panel and battery manufacture.

1 week ago | news.mongabay.com | Philip Jacobson

Southeast Asia’s clean-energy startups like Vietnam’s SmartSolar and Indonesia’s Swap Energi are expanding but face growing challenges due to waning government support and shifting global investment trends. U.S. and regional funding cuts, along with economic uncertainty and geopolitical shifts, are making it harder for renewable startups to secure long-term financing and scale their operations.

1 week ago | southafricatoday.net | IQ Score |Philip Jacobson

Police in Indonesia charged at least 11 people in the month of March with wildlife crimes after a tiger was butchered in Riau province and alleged traffickers were found with body parts in the semiautonomous province of Aceh. In West Sumatra province, conservation officials successfully trapped a young female tiger whose leg had previously been amputated, likely in a snare trap. Sumatran tigers are a critically endangered subspecies of tiger and fewer than 400 are believed to remain in the wild.

1 week ago | envirolink.org | Philip Jacobson

MALINAU, Indonesia — Indonesia is pressing ahead with construction of a new network of dams in Borneo to power a major “green” industrial estate that will relocate Indigenous communities and cut into one of Asia’s largest stretches of intact rainforest. “Finding fish and animals has already become difficult,” Yusmarang, a member of North Kalimantan’s Punan Indigenous community, told Mongabay Indonesia.

4 weeks ago | southafricatoday.net | Philip Jacobson

Research shows that landscape changes across the Musi River Basin in Indonesia’s South Sumatra province risks food security across the river delta as fish stocks diminish and protein availability declines, including in the provincial capital, Palembang. Some fish traders and artisans in the city of 1.8 million worry culinary culture in Palembang is becoming endangered as rising sedimentation in the Musi River threatens the freshwater snakehead murrel fish.