BALIKPAPAN, East Kalimantan — Planners building Indonesia’s new capital city in eastern Borneo say they’re far from their target of reforesting the site that the country’s president has projected will be a “green forest city” that the government plans to inaugurate later this year. Among the main obstacles: a tree-planting program that caters more to the convenience of bureaucrats than the local ecology; a preference for nonnative tree species unsuited to the region; and a general lack of planning and coordination that’s resulted in some reforested areas being razed again for construction. The new capital, known as Nusantara, sits on former mining and logging concessions in the province of East Kalimantan, with much of the landscape today barren or degraded. President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has said he envisions the new capital being surrounded by biodiverse tropical rainforest with a rich variety of tree species, rather than the monoculture plantations that blanket the region. “The concept of Nusantara is a forest city, which means this area has to be green, the environment here has to be green, and lastly, the buildings here have to be green as well,” the president said during a visit to the project site on Dec. 20, 2023. Since late 2022, the government has reforested 2,141 hectares (5,291 acres) of the Nusantara site, while mining companies have rehabilitated another 3,400 hectares (8,400 acres) of their former concessions here. That’s less than a tenth of the government’s 82,891-hectare (204,828-acre) reforestation target — an area larger than Jakarta or…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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