Residential areas next to a major nickel processing site on Indonesia’s Halmahera Island recorded exponential increases in diagnoses of respiratory infections between 2020 and 2023.
A US$9 billion infrastructure project aims to turn the sparsely populated home to remote Indigenous tribes into a Hong Kong-like industrial port city that could see the local population increase by 8,000 per cent. Activists say the project is tantamount to genocide.
There is a 'massive gap between rhetoric and reality' that must be closed by new climate pledges being drafted under the Paris Agreement, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) says.