Azka Syamila, Action for Ecology and People Emancipation
Mainstreaming biodiversity within and across sectors is the key to the implementation of KMGBF, particularly in planning and managing development that drives land-use change, such as the development of extractive industry. Target 1 calls on Parties to ensure that all areas are under participatory, integrated and biodiversity inclusive spatial planning. Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) provide spatial datasets that help governments and stakeholders to identify and map where conservation priorities lie. However, one of the main challenges in implementing this target is when extractive industry’s concessions have been allocated without consideration of biodiversity matters, resulting in overlaps between extractive industry’s concessions and KBAs.
In Indonesia, for example, overlaps between extractive industry’s concessions and KBAs are escalating. Since nickel demand started rising for electric vehicle battery amidst global agenda for energy transition, new nickel mines have proliferated across Sulawesi and North Maluku, along with new smelting facilities. Sulawesi and North Maluku are regions bearing outstanding biodiversity with high endemism. According to KBA datasets, Sulawesi and North Maluku has 206 KBAs, 28 of which overlap with more than a hundred nickel mine concessions, with overlapping areas up to152,000 hectares. In Southeast Sulawesi, endemic dwarf lowland buffalo (Bubalus depressicornis) occurred repeatedly inside nickel mine concessions, which happen to intersect with KBAs. Even though KBAs are not legally protected, these phenomena have raised concerns in habitat loss and fragmentation. This situation, then, affects broader irony: minerals needed to accelerate energy transition are being sourced in ways that undermine biodiversity.
What happened in Indonesia underscores the importance of biodiversity mainstreaming in planning and managing development, and the urgency to accelerate the identification and further protection of biodiversity-rich areas. The overlaps between biodiversity-rich areas with development agenda also need to be addressed, preferably before, but also after the development takes place.