JAKARTA — Briantama Asmara first visited the village of Kais in Indonesian Papua, on the island of New Guinea, in 2017 as an university researcher. The village lies two time zones away from Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, but it takes a four-hour flight, followed by a four-hour car ride and a three-hour boat trip to get there. The Indigenous Kais people are named after the river that flows through their land, and rely on its water for bathing, washing, drinking and fishing. Back then, Briantama says, the river water was still relatively clean and the villagers weren’t complaining. But by the time he returned in 2022, there had been dramatic changes to the region’s watershed. Several companies had moved into the area and started clearing the forests for oil palm plantations. At least one-quarter of the watershed, about 61,200 hectares (151,200 acres), has been allocated for three private oil palm concessions held by a single conglomerate. As of 2021, it had cleared nearly 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) to plant oil palms. “The villagers had started to feel the impact, such as flooding and a decrease in water quality,” Briantama, who now works as a GIS analyst at the World Resources Institute (WRI) Indonesia, told Mongabay. “The villagers go fishing every day. Now they have to go further into the river mouth to catch fish.” Map of the Kais River watershed of West Papua, Indonesia. Oil palm plantations have long been known to cause biodiversity loss when they’re established by clearing…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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