The nickel in the mountain above Morombo Pantai is mined, then loaded onto barges, permanently changing the landscape where Utete’s family lives and on which they depend for their livelihoods and traditional way of life.

This is nickel country.

Indonesia is the world’s largest producer of nickel, supplying more than sixty percent of the global share in 2025.^[2] Nickel mine production has increased from 168,500 tons in 2016 to 2.6 million tons in 2025, while the number of nickel smelters has surged from just two to more than sixty, leaving a trail of environmental destruction and human suffering in their wake.^[3] Nickel, a key raw material in the renewable energy transition, is used to build batteries for electric vehicles and to produce stainless steel for cleaner, wealthier communities and cities far away.

When rain hits the stripped slopes, red earth from nickel mining areas runs into the sea—a sea Utete’s people, the Bajau, have fished for as many years as anyone can count. The women here say that the fish have learned what the color means: they won’t come near a red net.

Between August 2025 and May 2026, Climate Rights International visited fourteen villages across the nickel frontier of Central and Southeast Sulawesi, two of the biggest nickel-producing regions in the country. Traveling down mine-hauling roads, across polluted rivers on motorized rafts, and out to stilt villages where waves sometimes crash through windows at night, we documented the costs to the people who live where nickel is mined, stacked, shipped, and processed.

Interviewing more than ninety people, Climate Rights International documented the human rights, environmental, and climate impacts of nickel mining and processing operations. Our October 2025 report, “Does Anyone Care?” The Human, Environmental, and Climate Toll of Indonesia’s Nickel Industry, pointed out the necessity of the energy transition, but found:

• severe air and water pollution
• health problems related to mining
• the destruction of fishing and farming livelihoods
• lack of access to health and environmental information
• land grabbing and a lack of or inadequate compensation for their land
• dangerous working conditions at mining and smelting facilities
• threats to Indigenous Peoples’ ways of life
• fear of retaliation for speaking out^[4]

Companies have failed to prevent unnecessary and foreseeable harms to the environment, health, and human rights, while the government has failed to hold them accountable and enforce Indonesia’s already weak laws.

The men in these villages tend to tell the story of the impact of nickel in terms of land bargained with nickel companies in hectares and rupiah, in land sold, in lost livelihoods, in jobs promised, and jobs that never came.

Yet many of the impacts we documented disproportionately impact women, leading women to describe the effects of the nickel industry differently. They tell it in the color of rainwater, in the price of a kilo of fish they once pulled from their own ponds, in a child’s pocket money, or in the number of seconds a hand can stay in the water before it comes out red.

While the lives of these women—pond farmers and fisherwomen, a raft operator, waste pickers, an activist, small-business owners, wives and mothers—and their villages are different, they tell a similar story. Repeatedly, women describe an industry that showed up without asking, promised everything, pays in dust, and may one day leave nothing but destruction behind. And in the midst of it all, women are often the ones keeping their families healthy and fed.

This is a record of what life for many women on Indonesia’s nickel frontier looks like now.

The journey to Tani Indah begins on a mine hauling road. Trucks roll past loaded with what looks like coal, while piles of what appears to be coal ash or other waste sits in low black ridges on both sides of the road. Then the thick, yellowish-red dust appears. It’s the color of earth being ripped open somewhere ahead. It doesn’t drift. It just hangs in the air.

Tani Indah sits where brackish water meets land in Morosi District, Konawe Regency, Southeast Sulawesi. The name means “beautiful farm” in Indonesian. This hasn’t always been a dream; it was reality.

Long ago, families moved to Tani Indah from all over Southeast Sulawesi for the promise of good fishing livelihoods and a high quality of life. They carved fish ponds, or empang, where fisherfolk cultivated tiger prawns, milkfish, and mud crabs. The catch went to the Southeast Sulawesi provincial capital, Kendari, and onwards to Singapore, Vietnam, and China, according to local villagers.

Starting in 2014, the nickel industry began operations in Tani Indah, dominated by the Virtue Dragon Nickel Industry (VDNI) smelter, which opened in 2014, and the Obsidian Stainless Steel (OSS) smelter and captive coal-fired power plant, which opened in 2017.^[5]

Villagers say they were promised jobs and prosperity in exchange for their land and fish ponds.

Dian Wana Utami: mother and pincara operator

For years, Dian, a 31-year-old mother of two, earned a livelihood from her fish ponds. As a young mother, she carried her first baby on her hip out to the fish ponds, setting crab traps with the child against her body. She waded in the water to help her husband with the prawn nets.

Then, around 2015, the fish started dying.

According to Dian, managing the fish ponds became unsustainable because of increased temperature fluctuations and the arrival of heavy machinery, including excavators, that changed the landscape to support the budding nickel industry. Because of these mounting challenges, her family was forced to stop managing the ponds, and Dian’s father-in-law sold their ten hectares to a nickel company. The land where the family’s once productive fish ponds stood is now a coal storage yard.

Just before the fish ponds began failing, Dian started to look for other work and found the pincara, a motorized wooden raft that carries people and motorbikes across the waterway. The pincara crossing across the Motui River used to be the shortcut that connected Tani Indah to the outside world.

She’s been driving a pincara since 2014, when she taught herself how to operate the ferry, an occupation traditionally only done by men. Despite the fact that Dian can’t swim, she started this new water-based job both because she needed the income and out of curiosity whether she could take on such a physically demanding job. On her first trips, she faced challenges operating the engine and the pincara sometimes got stuck in the trees along the riverbanks.

“The fear itself is what made me brave.”

There was a time when the crossing paid well. In a good week, Dian could earn Rp2 million to Rp3 million (roughly US$110 to $165), and even more during weddings or when students came home for holidays. She burned five liters of fuel per day to keep up with demand.

Then, the nickel industry arrived in full force. Heavy traffic from mining trucks and industrial activities damaged the road leading to the water. Passengers began taking the long way around on better maintained roads past the VDNI complex and the hauling road, instead of riding a pincara across the river.

Now, Dian earns Rp250,000 or Rp300,000 (US$14 to $17) in a full day behind the pincara engine, a much lower daily and weekly rate than before since there is no longer consistent daily demand for pincara rides. She only uses two liters of fuel due to the decreased demand for ferry services. The few passengers who still ride the pincara complain about the wait for Dian to get enough passengers to launch the ferry, because ferrying a single motorbike at a time doesn’t cover the costs of petrol.

Around the time that Dian began operating the pincara, her husband had a job as a security guard at OSS, but he lost that too after taking time off to accompany Dian for the birth of their second child in 2018. Now, he fishes the canal and the abandoned ponds the company bought but don’t conserve. A night’s catch used to reach ten kilos. Now it’s five. Enough, Dian says without bitterness, “for his cigarettes.”

The raft has cost her more than money.

One dry day, with a passenger on board, the pincara ran aground on the sand. There was no one else, so she climbed down and pushed to dislodge the ferry.

“I pushed the raft. That’s where the bleeding started.”

She miscarried, so her doctor told her to stop heavy work while she recovered. She spent ten months ashore, then went back to the pincara because there was no one else to drive the ferry and her family needed the income.

When there’s nothing, she borrows from the kiosk. “Better to owe than not to eat.”

Nobody ever told the village what was coming, she says.

She learned the vocabulary of her new surroundings from neighbors. That yellow earth? They call it ore. The black rocks? Coal. Dian only knows what’s happening in the industrial sites from rumor: “People say it’s to help cook the nickel.”

Dian has not received any compensation for the dust that chokes her home and her family’s lungs. The company is a constant presence in her life. Men from its community-relations office sometimes come and sit on her terrace, where they smoke but say little.

“They never say anything about the problems. Sometimes I think they’re just watching.”

To challenge the industry and its impacts, Dian joined a group of villagers, led by her neighbor Kamriadi, that has started organizing, petitioning, and traveling to talk about the impacts of the nickel industry on the people of Tani Indah. In 2024, a coalition of local residents and NGOs, including Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia (The Indonesian Forum on Environment, Walhi) Southeast Sulawesi, Kendari Legal Aid Institute (LBH), and Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI), filed a lawsuit against Obsidian Stainless Steel regarding the pollution from its facilities, which include a nickel and stainless steel smelter and a captive coal plant.^[7]

In May 2025, a group of villagers traveled to Jakarta to lobby national ministries and raise awareness of community impacts with the national press, a trip she followed and supported through the group’s chat.^[8] Dian says she is not afraid to stand up to a company despite their size.

“We’re not alone. We all feel the same thing.”

Her wish is simple.

“If only it could be like before. Passengers flowing. Fish easy to catch—you wanted prawns, you just went and cast the net in the pond. My thinking is about only one thing now: the children.”

The pond women

Taji Intan, in her 60s, came to Tani Indah from Bulukumba Regency in South Sulawesi in the 1990s. Back then, one three-month harvest of shrimp, fish, and crabs could bring her family Rp40–50 million (about US$2,500–3,100). Buyers came straight to her house.

Taji Intan’s neighbor Hasnia is in her 40s. Her family’s land and fish ponds once covered ten hectares. A nickel company bought half of Hasnia’s family’s land back when the industry first arrived, but the family’s remaining five hectares land still had at least one fish pond that they could use to sustain their livelihood. Land was cheap, and locals didn’t know the consequences of selling their land to the nickel industry. Now, the boundary between Hasnia’s land and OSS’s captive coal plant is a concrete wall.

The family’s remaining fish pond relies on water from a local river, which Hasnia says has become polluted from the nickel industry. Fish and shrimp now no longer survive in the pond due to the pollution.

“We go down to the pond every day, hoping the shrimp will grow fast. They never grow. A whole year now, and no harvest.”^[10]

Her husband has waited years for the job he says he was promised by the company when half of their land and most of their fish ponds were sold. “Always promised, promised, promised. Until now, nothing.”

He’s stopped waiting politely and started joining other villagers who block a road leading to the nickel industrial area in protest. According to Hasnia: “He says: how else do I get work, if not by blocking the road?”

Hasnia now talks about moving to Kolaka Regency in Southeast Sulawesi, where her parents live—but only, she says, once the company pays for the damages to her family’s fish pond. Her hopes for the village she’d leave behind are specific:

“Stop dumping the waste into the canal. Close the [coal plant]. Before the company, there was no money either, but it was peaceful. Life was calm.”

Tapunggaya and Tapuemea: where the sea turned red

Tapunggaya and Tapuemea sit side by side on the coast of North Konawe, Southeast Sulawesi. The two villages are so close that the only thing that separates them is a mosque. Roughly nine hundred families live here.

Behind the villages, the hills have been stripped bare and carved into red terraces by nickel mining companies. In front of Tapunggaya and Tapuemea, the sea that once fed residents for generations has turned the same red color as the mined hills.

The women who live at the foot of the mines aren’t necessarily against mining. Some of them helped build the industry: they cooked for the miners, kept the books, and guarded the equipment at night. Many of their households rely on wages from the nickel industry.  

Yet, the women of Tapunggaya and Tapuemea describe an industry that showed up without consent. One that pays in rice and dust money.^[11] One that could disappear tomorrow—leaving red water, empty hills, and mothers doing the math of dwindling family finances at the kitchen table.

Jumatin: Bajau fisherwoman

Jumatin doesn’t know how old she is. She is Bajau and was born on a boat.

“My parents, poor things, didn’t know my birth date, my age. We were born on the boat, raised on the boat. We didn’t live in houses then. The boat was our house.” ^[12]

Her childhood was filled with rowing and sails, sago and dried corn instead of rice, and a sea so full of fish that a good catch barely required effort.

“Even at night I’d walk out and catch fish. You could lie down, drop the net under the house, and there’d be fish. Back then, just an oil torch was enough to go fishing—and you’d catch something.”

Clams were the family’s main source of livelihood.

That was before the nickel mines came.

Now, a full night on the water brings three or maybe five kilos. The reason is visible from her doorstep. When rain hits the stripped hills, red earth pours into the bay.

“It’s all turned red. Even the clams—we can’t see them anymore. The mud covers the clam beds.”

The fish know the color now. “If the net is red, if the mesh is red, the fish won’t come near. They run.”

So, the fishers must run farther and farther out, chasing clear water and burning fuel they can barely afford. “Fifteen liters of petrol now [to go far enough to sea to catch fish]. Where are we supposed to get that money?”

Jumatin cannot afford to buy fifteen liters of petrol, so she buys two liters at a time, where there is money, and stretches the fuel by keeping the engine at a crawl.

“I go slowly, slowly, as long as we arrive. I keep two oars in the boat. If the petrol runs out on the way, we row home.”

The distance isn’t just expensive. It’s dangerous.

According to Jumatin and others in her village, Bajau fisherfolk are increasingly being attacked by crocodiles because environmental degradation forces fisherfolk into hazardous, unknown fishing grounds, while that same pollution threatens the natural habitat of crocodiles, pushing them closer to people. On one trip, a crocodile attacked Jumatin’s husband while he was fishing in a river. He was bitten in the early hours and rushed across the water for help. He survived, but barely.

Her cousin, while fishing in the sea, did not.

Ask Jumatin what the nickel is for—what it becomes, where it goes—and she shakes her head. “We only know they load the earth. We see it when we pass. What it’s for, we don’t know.”

No one from the mining companies has ever explained it to her. “Why would they bother with us? People say we Bajau are stupid people, people with no schooling. So they don’t care.”

What the company gives, she says, is rice. Sacks handed out to the village whenever enough barges of ore leave the jetty. “Every five barges, there’s rice. Every ten barges, more rice. One sack we eat, one sack we sell—that buys the fuel, the coffee, the cigarettes.”

Politicians show up with promises at election time. Then they vanish. “When they need votes, suddenly the Bajau have needs too. Afterwards, nobody cares who you are.”

Her rule for getting by is simple: “We just have to be grateful for whatever there is. That’s what we eat.”

Nurtina: cook and activist

Nurtina, in her late fifties, has stood on both sides of the fence of a nickel mining concession.

In 1999, she worked as a cook for PT Antam, the state-owned mining company, earning Rp300,000 (US$17) per month.

Local residents say that nickel mining in North Konawe Regency’s Mandiodo Block goes back to at least 1999, when nickel mining companies started showing up in Tapunggaya. Since 2010, PT Aneka Tambang (Antam), an Indonesian government-backed mining company, has held the IUP-OP (permit for production operation) for the Mandiodo-Lasolo-Lalindu area. The government suspended all operations in the Mandiodo Block in August 2023 due to a corruption and bribery investigation.^[13] In April 2026, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources approved PT Antam’s 2026 Work Plan and Budget (RKAB) which included a 3.4 million metric ton goal for its North Konawe operations, which include the Mandiodo Block concession.^[14] But as of August 2026, it is unclear whether PT Antam has since restarted mine operations above Tapunggaya and Tapuemea.

The pause in nickel mining operations has not led to mining rehabilitation, so people like Nurtina now face the dual environmental and economic impacts of living below nickel mines with no industry jobs.

Two decades after she started working in the nickel industry, in 2023 and 2025, Nurtina joined big demonstrations of villagers who marched up the mined mountain, still held by PT Antam, which the company was neither mining nor rehabilitating. The protests focused on a lack of compensation for land held by PT Antam, the heavy presence of military and police forces, environmental and economic displacement, and lack of local employment.

Nurtina said that the police answered with tear gas: “That turned out to be dangerous enough.”

After the demonstrations, security forces became a permanent presence in Tapunggaya and Tapuemea. Navy and army personnel, maybe a hundred at one point, were housed in two rented houses in Tapunggaya, including in one house directly in front of Nurtina’s home.

“In uniform, every day, with their vehicles, every day. Think about it. The people are being intimidated over their own land. We can’t farm it—the company holds it. We can’t mine it. So how are the people supposed to eat? Are we supposed to starve to death?”

These days, Nurtina’s family lives on her nearly seventy-year-old husband’s Rp3 million (US$185) per month salary as a night watchman guarding machinery for a nickel mining company.

Her demands are modest: separate the mining haul roads from the one public road in and out of the village, and give the women economic opportunities.

“Let us write a proposal, give us capital to sell cakes, to do laundry for the [mining worker] camps [when operations resume]. Because right now, finding money is so hard.”

Kurisa and Labota, Morowali Regency: women at the doorstep of an industrial giant

The Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) in Central Sulawesi spans 5,500 hectares and has pushed the regency’s GDP per capita to the top of the national charts—over Rp900 million a year, roughly US$52,000 per person.^[16]

Almost none of that money stays. What the smelters add in value goes mostly to the park's investors and to suppliers far from this coast. Even the wages tell the same story: workers in the industrial park come from other cities and provinces in Indonesia or from China, and many Indonesian workers send their salaries back home.^[17] Arianto Sangaji, a scholar and activist who has studied Morowali's nickel industry for two decades, estimates that more than 95 percent of the value leaves the region.^[18] The jobs are real. The money passes through.

An estimated 90,000 people now work for more than fifty companies inside IMIP, including at the industrial park’s fifteen operational smelters.^[19] Villages that once faced the sea now face coal stockpiles, smelter stacks, and jetties.

Yet, in one of the richest regencies in Indonesia, women who once ran lucrative fishing businesses now work as waste pickers.

Many women who we met at the doorstep to one of the world’s largest nickel hubs share a similar tale: they speak of daily work to hold their families together in a place where the water has turned hot, the air smells of toxic pollution, and the future is something you save up for somewhere else.

Gusnah: from fisherwoman to waste picker

Gusnah, in her late 50s, doesn’t start with a story. She starts with a demand: come down to the water. Put your hand in.

The sea under her house in Kurisa village sits a few hundred meters from an industrial wastewater discharge point. Her whole village stands on stilts above the flowing warm water.

Gusnah has lived in Kurisa since 1991, back when the coastline was still forest. For most of those thirty-plus years, she ran an octopus operation with a crew of men, buying the catch and supplying a trader who ran it to Kendari once per week, earning two three million rupiah (US$110 to $167). Under the stilt houses, Gusnah and other families kept pens of live fish.

Those pens are gone now. The rocks where women foraged along the shore are buried under silt. Her husband had a stroke and can’t work. Her son-in-law, a fisherman, died eight years ago. Four grandchildren live under her roof. So, for the past two years, Gusnah has collected plastic bottles.

A kilo of plastic bottles is sold for up to Rp3,500 (US$0.20). In a typical week, Gusnah earns Rp300,000 (US$17) from waste picking, most of it already owed to someone.

Sometimes Gusnah joins other former fisherwomen who charter a car together and drive an hour to villages and beaches to collect waste because they are embarrassed to do so at home.

“Here there are plenty of bottles, but we’re embarrassed [to collect waste]. Cars pass, motorbikes pass. We’re afraid people will laugh at us.”

Gusnah has no other option due to her family’s increasing debt. Lenders move through the village daily or weekly to collect on loans. “We can’t take much, because what would we repay it with?” She borrows against bottles she hasn’t collected yet, Rp500,000 at a time, and asks her buyer for money before the weighing. “If we didn’t [borrow money], what would we eat?”

Her days start at one or two in the morning. She cooks nasi kuning—turmeric rice—to sell at daybreak, earning up to Rp100,000 (US$5.50). Then, she collects bottles. Some nights, Gusnah also makes fried cakes to sell.

This year, she sold the front section of her house plot to a neighbor. With the money, she’s building four small rental rooms for factory workers from other parts of Indonesia.

Two of the rooms are now occupied, but one still has no roof because she is fifteen zinc sheets short and is without funds to finish construction.

“Many times. People come from outside, take samples of the water, and then, nothing. They say help is coming, a house is coming. Nothing comes.”

Ask what she hopes for, and the request is small: “Just let them look at us. We are like this. Give a little help, for the things we can’t do ourselves.”

A neighbor and a newcomer

Esti, in her 30s or 40s, was born in Kurisa and raised on “one hundred percent fishing.” She raised six children on fish, octopus, and sea cucumber. “We washed the rice in seawater. We washed the fish, the dishes in seawater.”^[21]

Three or four years ago, the sea in front of her house turned murky and warm. It itches on the skin now. The children can’t bathe in it anymore. Her husband still fishes, but the fish have moved beyond the reach of a small boat.

“Ten liters of fuel, minimum, to reach a place with fish. Sometimes he comes home empty — the money we had at home is what’s gone. We are fishermen who, if we don’t buy fish, then we don’t eat fish. Sometimes it’s just rice and plain water.”

Esti leaves at seven in the morning to collect plastic bottles and comes home in the afternoon or evening.

She wanted to complain but didn't know to whom. People come to the village, ask their questions, and go. Nothing changes. “Who do we complain to? Who do we ask for help?”

“People say: you people must be rich now, you live next to the companies. I tell them, if we could trade, we would trade villages. You live here, and feel what we feel.”

Ask about her hopes and she goes quiet at first. “You can’t really speak of hope, because hope is a big thing. Who would want a life like this? We just want what we had. Back then, even if we weren’t rich, it was enough.”

A few kilometers away, in Labota, lives the other face of the boom. Not the villager the industry pushed out—the young mother it pulled in.

“Anisa” is twenty-two.^[22] She married at eighteen and immediately moved to Labota village because her husband already worked inside IMIP. Currently, he’s a safety officer earning around Rp7 million a month (US$390).

Her family of four shares a single rented room that costs Rp1.1 million (US$61) per month, in a row of rooms filled with other workers’ families.

Her daughter’s first cough came at five months old. Her three-year-old son has been diagnosed with acute respiratory infection. The company clinic treats it for free, but the illnesses keep coming back. Health workers told the family that the villages near IMIP have the highest rates of acute respiratory infections in Morowali.

The children almost never play outside. Every morning, “Anisa” opens the windows and wipes away black dust. In this neighborhood, the cheap zinc roofs rust through in a month due to the acid rain from the industrial park’s captive coal plants.

“Anisa” lives with the fear of what the dangerous conditions inside the industrial park gates could mean for her husband. There have been serious accidents in the industrial park, including an explosion that killed several workers, a man crushed by a forklift, and a worker whose face was torn open by a swinging load.^[24]

“Every time there’s an incident, I call him. I tell him: be careful in there. He says himself that safety inside is still lacking.”^[25] His last medical check found the first signs of hearing loss.

“Anisa” has turned her fear into a plan: she sends remittances to both families and installments on a plot of land far from IMIP. “God willing, when the land is paid off, we will build, little by little. Two or three years, maybe.”

Around her, others have already decided to leave. “Anisa” has seen more and more houses in Labota stand empty.

Molino and Towara: where the flood came down

The villages of Towara, Tompira, and Molino in Petasia Timur District, North Morowali Regency, Central Sulawesi lie beneath nickel mining operations and near a large nickel industrial smelter complex. This area has shifted from small-scale farming, coastal, and riverine livelihoods to the frontline of Indonesia’s nickel boom.

The women of the river

Follow the Laa River up from Molino and you reach Towara and Tompira villages, where people live off meti, the freshwater shellfish that have fed families here for generations.

Under a wooden shelter by the riverbank, a dozen women sit on the ground around mounds of boiled shells. They flick the meat out with practiced thumbs. The floor beneath them isn’t earth. It’s decades of discarded meti shells, tipped into the swamp by their mothers and grandmothers until the swamp turned solid. Their houses stand on shell. The ground itself is women’s work.

Sunarti has shelled meti for decades.

“My eldest is twenty-two; I was doing this work before she was in the womb.”^[26]

But the river the work depends on, the women say, is being taken out from under them.

The women count five dredging boats working the river. Ask where the sand goes, and they point to the boom the nickel mines created and the need for construction materials to build the boarding houses for workers. Ask when the dredgers multiplied, and the answer is the same every time: after the nickel mines came.

Sunarti’s own plot by the river, one and a half hectares, is a third gone into the widening river. She asked the dredgers for Rp1 million (US$57) per month while they worked beside her boundary, but they refused. The river, they told her, belongs to no one.

Sunarti’s family stays because there is nowhere else to go and because the river, for all it takes, is still a part of her community.

Ribka: mother, warung owner

By midnight on August 19, 2025, Ribka, in her 30s, had almost fallen asleep. It had rained all evening in Molino. Hard, then soft, then hard again. Water was already pooling in the kitchen, two cement blocks high. There had already been six floods in the four years she’d rented this small house, but the water always went back out.

“‘Am I allowed to sleep now?’ I asked my husband — because I’d been anxious all evening. I wanted to sleep, but I was afraid.” ^[27]

Years ago, she came east to Molino, where the mines were hiring and a woman with a stove could feed the boom. She ran a warung—a small roadside eatery—from the front of the house. Her husband drove sand to the companies. Their two-year-old boy was born here, on the nickel frontier. This evening, her child, “the greatest gift,” was already asleep in the bedroom.

So Ribka didn’t sleep. She lay in the dark scrolling her phone until half past midnight, listening to the rain. Then she drifted off for maybe ten minutes. Her husband’s voice tore her awake. “Darling, get up. A big flood.”

He grabbed the child and ran for the door. Ribka fell twice inside her own house—tangled in mud, tripping in the dark. The power was gone. Whole trees, carried down from somewhere upstream, had slammed into the house and jammed the door shut. She pulled with everything she had.

Outside, the road turned into a river. Ribka, her husband and son, and the young couple from next door, linked hands in the current to avoid being swept away. The neighbor was three months pregnant and kept losing her footing, so the group closed around her. They climbed onto two parked cars and clung there, calculating: if the cars move, we go with the water. After ten minutes, it was Ribka who made the call. “Let’s cross to that house,” she said. Hand in hand, holding each other up, the two families waded through.

“Seven times we have been flooded in four years,” she said the next day.

She was sitting in a borrowed room, in a borrowed sarong. All she owns now are the clothes she escaped in.

“This was the first time like this. Not a flood—I’ve seen floods on a phone screen. This I lived through myself. Like a tsunami.”

Not every woman in Molino got out the way Ribka did. The wife of the hamlet head was ripped from her husband in the dark. The current tore her loose and dragged her under a parked car. Three people together couldn’t pull her out against the water. She was taken to hospital.

“Her husband was being swept away himself. He couldn’t reach her.”

By morning, five houses were destroyed or damaged. Three were simply gone. There was now a clean, empty rectangle of mud where Ribka’s roadside eatery stood. Everything was washed away: the six dining tables, the big frying cart, the freezer, the fridge, the motorbike, the Rp3 million (US$168) cash her husband had just withdrawn after payday, and the ATM card in the bag.

The morning after, in the boarding house where the displaced women slept, Ribka sat with a pen and paper, itemizing a lost life. Unknown company men had come around with instructions: write down everything the water took, and it will be replaced.

Which company?

“We don’t know which company it is up there.”

She told us what everyone in Molino believes: the water came down from the direction of the many nickel mines. Arman Marunduh, a local legislator, is familiar with the companies working in the area. The day after the flood, he visited the mining site above the village and saw what he had expected: a dam had broken at a mining company’s site near the main bridge, where the water flows in. He says this was not just a natural disaster.

“We’ve already warned them multiple times. They pretend they’ve addressed the issue, but this incident shows they haven’t done anything.”^[28]

There is documentation of those warnings. Several companies have concessions in the hills above Molino, but none have acknowledged responsibility for the flood.  

Residents say the hillsides have been cleared of forest, leaving nothing to slow heavy rain or hold back the water. By 2025, water pollution, runoff, deforestation, and damage to agricultural areas had reached the fish ponds and oil palm plots that the villages rely on. People raised complaints to regency and provincial government agencies, documented what they saw, and spoke up again, with Arman joining them.

“We’ve gone to the provincial capital to meet with the mining inspector at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, then to the Provincial Environmental Agency – same complaints.”

How officials handled those complaints is a matter of record. In November 2024, the regional council of North Morowali held a hearing about mining damage to the villages’ clean water sources, and another hearing took place in early 2025 as the damage spread to ponds and farmland. The provincial environmental agency later visited Molino. According to Arman, officials inspected the area and used a drone to survey it, then announced there was no pollution or environmental damage, but they did not take any samples of water, air, or soil.

Arman then went to the governor to ask him to reprimand the head of the environment agency for the insufficient inspection. Arman says the governor promised that someone would return to inspect the area. Eventually, someone did come back, but only after the dam had burst, after the houses were swept away, and after Ribka sat writing down everything her family had lost.

Morombo Pantai: the village of clear water—in the past

The women of Morombo keep coming back to one phrase, saying it the way you’d say the name of someone who died: terang air, clear water.

Morombo sits on the coast of North Konawe in Southeast Sulawesi. Stilt houses line the edge of the sea. The first hamlet holds about eighty Bajau families. Their ancestors lived on boats for their whole lives. The water was everything.

The Bajau didn’t just live by this sea, they were a part of it. Traditionally, when a baby was born, the cord was cut with bamboo. The placenta was washed, wrapped in cloth, weighted with a stone, perfumed with incense, prayed over, and given to the sea. Then the newborn was dipped in the water, so the child would grow up strong.

But the sea had to be clean for that.

“Now it’s dirty,” says Diana.^[29]

Nobody in Morombo could tell us the name of the mining company on the hill above their village. A few of the women, the ones whose husbands work up there, know the word nickel, but they don’t know what it’s for.

Residents say that no one from the mining companies or the government consulted with the villagers about the mining project before operations began, despite legal requirements that affected communities be informed and given opportunity to provide input before an environmental permit is issued.^[30] Then, the runoff began coming down the hill—and the community’s word for their sea changed from terang air to kabur, or murky.

Diana: Mother of four. Born on the water

“If we get money, we eat rice. If we don’t, we don’t eat.”^[31]

Diana, in her 60s, was born on a small houseboat, near the village of Tapunggaya. She delivered her first child in a houseboat with no midwife. She remembers arriving at the place that would become Morombo village before there were any inhabitants, only dense trees down to the waterline. The families cleared the shoreline, built hut-style houses, and Morombo began. She has four children and more than ten grandchildren, most of them within shouting distance of her home.

According to Diana, traditionally men speared fish with a trident, while women gathered shellfish, dried them in the sun, strung them five to a cord, and sold the cords at the market.

“Our strength, the strength of the Bajau, is the sea. Our ancestors said that if a Bajau goes up onto the land, they die. People on the hill can plant palm, plant coconut, plant anything. What can we plant in the sea? Nothing. That’s why our strength is in the water.”

Her eyes water all the time now. Her legs are going. She says stress has clouded her memory. The one thing she can still do at sea is dive for shellfish. “Fish, no. Only the shellfish now.”

Before the nickel mine, Diana could catch two or three kilos of fish at a time, earning Rp30,000 (US$1.67) per kilo. Up to a hundred thousand rupiah (US$5.50) earned by fishing each day, spent by evening, earned again the next morning.

Now? “Ten, twenty thousand a day. That’s it.”

Rp20,000 (US$1) buys just one liter of rice, so Diana splits the liter in two: half cooked in the morning and the other half at midday. Dinner depends on the sea. On bad days it’s sago porridge from a sack bought on credit. On the worst days, the only thing to eat is plain rice.

The mine took other things too. The forest paths up the hill, which families used to reach the farming villages above to trade fish for vegetables, are closed.

“It’s forbidden by the company. Before, we could climb the mountain.”

Girls here marry as young as twelve. By twenty, many have three or four children. The school is a far walk up the hill. Health services, including basic medical care, are barely accessible.

And the rite that told every Bajau child who they were—the cord given to clean water, the newborn dipped so it would grow strong — is on hold. Waiting for a sea that may not come back.

“[The sea] still gives strength. But now it gives us two fish, three fish. Before, the trays came up full. It’s different now.”

Utete: traditional midwife and fisherwoman

“We eat from that dust money now.”^[32]

Utete is the woman this story began with: the boat, the three-layer net, the children calling to her across the water. She’s also Morombo’s traditional midwife and the keeper of the birth rite.

These days, she has a rule when she washes her catch: never leave anything in the water longer than a minute.

“It’s filth. It’s poison. If we soak things longer than a minute, they come out red. Even if you go far [out to sea], you look down, where before you could see a fish swim, a sea cucumber, a giant clam, now, nothing. Once, one night out and you ate. Everything the house needed, in one night. Now?”

What replaced the sea is dust money, the compensation is about what one day of fishing used to be worth, but now stretched over ninety days until the next payment arrives.

But dust money doesn’t always arrive.

Ask the women of Morombo whether they’d rather have the dust money or the life before it, and nobody hesitates. “Before,” one says at a gathering. “True, we didn’t get money from anyone. But it flowed. Twenty, thirty thousand, every day, all day. We ate from our own sweat.”^[33]

The dust the money is named for settles on everything, including the food. Most people in the village cough, while many have other ailments that they believe are linked to the dust, including tuberculosis, chest pain, aching bones, and children’s fevers.

“If it’s not fever, it’s something else,” one mother says of her grandchildren. “Because of the dust.”

Closing

These stories from women on the frontlines of the nickel industry are just a small glimpse of the ways that nickel mining and processing have fundamentally changed the lives of the people who have long called Southeast and Central Sulawesi home. These impacts—loss of livelihoods, destruction of culture, threats to health, increased exposure to disasters, and more—are the result of an industry that prioritizes profit and economic growth over the rights of local communities and workers. They also evidence deep government indifference—or worse. Indeed, Indonesian, Chinese, and other foreign companies are taking advantage of the rush to secure minerals to extract nickel in an unjust, harmful, and carbon-intensive way yet, instead of protecting people and the environment, the government is actively supporting an industry that steamrolls over Indigenous and other communities.

What the mothers ask for

Put their demands side by side and you notice how small they are. “Small” is their word, not ours. A fair price for land and fish ponds that actually compensates for lost fishing and farming livelihoods. A separate road for the haul trucks so they don’t share the same one with kids walking to school. Dust money that actually shows up. A little capital to sell cakes or wash laundry for the camps. Fifteen sheets of zinc for a room with no roof. A million rupiah per month for a riverbank that’s sliding into the water.

Ribka just wants to be protected from future disasters. “If it can be managed so things are better ahead—so this never happens again. We’re the ones who carry the loss. That’s all we hope for from the mines up there.”

A few want more. “Me, I hope it closes, so the ponds can produce again,” said Taji Intan in Tani Indah. “Close the PLTU [captive coal plant],” said her neighbor Hasnia. But most wouldn’t go that far, most couldn’t. Their husbands drive the industry’s trucks and guard its machines at night. Their sons run the excavators. Even the school lunches, where they exist, arrive stamped with a company’s name.

So most mothers aren’t refusing the nickel. They’re refusing the terms.

And the terms, right now, are these: the world gets nickel, and the mothers get the math. One liter of rice split into two meals. The value of a single day’s catch stretched over ninety days of dust money. Three thousand rupiah a kilo, paid to women sitting on ground their grandmothers built out of shells.

Climate Rights International’s recommendations:

To the Government of Indonesia 

• Immediately stop the permitting of new nickel mining concessions and smelters until the sector has taken genuine steps in line with the best available science and technologies to minimize emissions, pollution, and other harms to nearby communities, the environment, and the climate system. 

• Adopt, strengthen, and enforce national laws and regulations to prevent, minimize, and mitigate the environmental, climate, and human rights harms to present and future generations caused by nickel mining, refining, and extractive waste on Indigenous Peoples and other affected communities, including: 

- Amend the environmental impact assessment process instituted by the Omnibus Law to allow the public, including civil society organizations and community members, full access to relevant information and the opportunity to participate in decision-making regarding proposed projects. 

- Amend the 2020 Mineral and Coal Mining Law article 162 to end the criminalization of peaceful expression, including protests, by activists and organizations. 

- Uphold, implement, and enforce Law No. 32 of 2009 on the Protection and Management of Environment, including through the imposition of meaningful civil and/or criminal penalties on companies that violate that law. 

- Codify into law the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, as recognized by the International Court of Justice in its Advisory Opinion of 23 July 2025 and in UN General Assembly resolution A/Res/76/30, which Indonesia supported, and take action to protect that right.  

- Undertake legal reforms to safeguard public participation, transparency, and accountability, and guarantee full respect for Indigenous Peoples’ rights in line with international law and standards. 

• Fully implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the right to free, prior, and informed consent, and legally recognize Indigenous Peoples within Indonesia, including by passing the Indigenous Peoples Rights Bill. 

• Ensure that domestic and foreign companies are fully compliant with Indonesian laws and regulations and hold companies and company executives accountable for violations of environmental, climate, human rights, and other laws, including through fines, cancellation of permits and licenses, and criminal prosecutions. 

• Fully implement the Guiding Principles on Critical Energy Transition Minerals established in the 2024 report by the UN Secretary-General’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals, the development of which the Indonesian government participated in. 

• Immediately stop the permitting of all new coal plants, include captive coal plants in national decarbonization and climate commitments, and move quickly to fulfill those commitments to comply with the International Court of Justice’s 2025 Advisory Opinion on States’ legal obligations in relation to climate change and the human rights of present and future generations. 

To the Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection 

• Conduct an in-depth investigation into the impacts of nickel mining and processing in Indonesia on the rights of women and children, and make the results of such an investigation publicly available and accessible to local communities. 

• Advocate with the Ministry of Environment and regional authorities for environmental impact assessments (AMDALs) for new and expanding nickel projects to assess the potential impacts on women and children, and ensure that those AMDALs are made publicly available and accessible to local communities, including by holding well-publicized public meetings and providing information in local languages. 

• Coordinate with the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources and other relevant national and local ministries and governments involved in nickel project permitting to ensure that women are fully and safely able to participate in consultation about new nickel projects. 

• Publicly call for the protection of women environmental and land defenders, including for protection of their rights to free speech and expression and ending legal criminalization of defenders. 

• Conduct an investigation into threats, harassment, and intimidation of women human rights defenders critical of the nickel industry and make the results publicly available and accessible to local communities. 

• Coordinate with the Ministry of Health to develop pre- and post-natal, maternal, and child health programs to address health concerns in communities impacted by nickel mining, nickel processing, and captive coal usage. 

• Coordinate with the Ministry of Education to improve access to education for primary and secondary school-aged children in nickel-impacted communities. 

• Coordinate with the Ministry of Environment to investigate environmental pollution, including air and water pollution, from nickel industrial parks and nickel mines, and the impacts of that pollution on women and children. 

• Provide training and resources on alternative livelihoods to women whose traditional farming and/or fishing livelihoods have been negatively impacted by the nickel industry.  

To nickel mining and processing companies in Southeast and Central Sulawesi 

• Ensure that all mining and industrial operations are carried out in accordance with Indonesian laws and regulations, as well as international environmental, climate, and human rights standards. 

• Fully and fairly compensate all community members who have had land taken without adequate compensation or due legal process, including in Indigenous communities or where insufficient compensation was previously provided. 

• Take immediate steps to prevent, minimize, mitigate, and remediate air pollution from mining and industrial processing activities, including by installing air pollution control mechanisms, mitigating dust from mining areas and hauling roads, and properly disposing of industrial waste, tailings, and coal ash, based on the best available science and technologies. 

• Take immediate steps to prevent, minimize, mitigate, and remediate water and soil pollution from mining and industrial processing activities, including by installing water pollution control mechanisms, properly disposing of industrial waste, tailings, and coal ash, and treating wastewater from industrial facilities and coal plants, based on the best available science and technologies. 

• Ensure that tailings ponds, mining waste storage facilities, and other infrastructure for managing waste is adequately and frequently maintained and inspected for safety. 

• Immediately stop the construction of all new coal plants at nickel industrial parks and announce a time-bound plan to urgently replace existing coal plants with renewable energy sources. 

• Fully respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples living near nickel sites, including by ensuring all Indigenous Peoples are able to exercise their right to give Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, their right to self-determination, and their right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. 

• Share all information related to future expansion, deforestation, land acquisition, and industrial activities with the public, and make that information accessible to local communities, including by holding well-publicized public meetings and providing information in local languages. 

To electric vehicle and battery companies 

• Leverage buying power to pressure mines, mineral processors, and suppliers to change practices that cause environmental, climate, or human rights harms, and, if necessary, stop sourcing nickel from producers engaged in violations. 

• Leverage buying power to pressure mining companies, mineral processors, and suppliers to provide publicly available information on water and air quality in the areas surrounding their operations, as well as an accurate account of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the use of coal to power nickel processing operations. 

• Require companies that directly supply materials or components (direct suppliers) to disclose their full list of intermediaries and suppliers (indirect suppliers). 

• Require direct suppliers to disclose information that shows they are implementing EV company policies on human rights, environmental, and climate due diligence with their suppliers, and make that information about EV battery supply chains publicly available and accessible. 

• Authorize and pay for regular, transparent, and independent audits of mines and facilities where nickel and other battery minerals are mined and refined to ensure that suppliers are following procedures that protect and respect human rights of present and future generations and Indigenous Peoples’ rights, meet environmental standards, and do not power industrial operations using fossil fuels. 

• Set explicit, time-bound targets to decarbonize nickel supply chains and ensure that suppliers are taking concrete steps to reach those targets. 

 Acknowledgements

This report was researched and written by Margareth Aritonang, Consultant, for Climate Rights International.

It was reviewed by Brad Adams, Executive Director, Linda Lakhdhir, Legal Director, and Krista Shennum, Senior Researcher.

Rodrigo Brandão, Communications Director, and Sakeena Razick, Program Associate, managed the report’s production. Riza Salman and Yuli Z. provided invaluable research support.

We would like to thank the Indonesian civil society groups that helped make this report possible. In particular, we would like to thank the following groups for their invaluable guidance and support: PuSPAHAM, Komunitas Teras, Walhi Sultra, KOMIU, Yayasan Tanah Merdeka.

Most importantly, this report would not be possible without the women and other community members in Southeast and Central Sulawesi who shared their stories with us.

Appendix

Prior to the release of this publication, Climate Rights International wrote to the following companies: PT Antam Tbk, Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park, Virtue Dragon Nickel Industry, and Obsidian Stainless Steel. As of the time of release, we did not receive any responses.

• PT Antam Tbk
• Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park
• Virtue Dragon Nickel Industry
• Obsidian Stainless Steel

Endnotes

^[1] Climate Rights International interview with Utete, May 8, 2026, Morombo Pantai, Southeast Sulawesi. 

^[2] International Nickel Study Group, “The world nickel market in 2025 and 2026 – five years of surpluses,” December 2025, https://insg.org/index.php/about-nickel/the-market-2025-12/ (accessed July 22, 2026).

^[3] USGS, “Nickel: Mineral Commodity Summaries,” January 2017, https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/mineral-pubs/nickel/mcs-2017-nicke.pdf (accessed August 18, 2026); USGS, “Nickel: Mineral Commodity Summaries,” February 2026, https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-nickel.pdf (accessed August 18, 2026); Tunnicliffe, Andy, “Indonesia’s Nickel Market Stranglehold Tightens, Again.” Mine, Issue 151, April, https://mine.nridigital.com/mine_apr25/indonesia-nickel-market-2025 (accessed October 2025).

^[4] Climate Rights International, “‘Does Anyone Care?’ The Human, Environmental, and Climate Toll of Indonesia’s Nickel Industry,” October 2025, https://cri.org/reports/does-anyone-care/.

^[5] Walhi, “Operasi PLTU Captive Merusak Ekologi Dan Kehidupan Rakyat Di Pulau Sulawesi,” June 13, 2023, https://www.walhi.or.id/operasi-pltu-captive-merusak-ekologi-dan-kehidupan-rakyat-di-pulau-sulawesi; PT Obsidian Stainless Steel, “An Evolving Tradition of Excellence,” n.d., https://oss.co.id/#:~:text=OSS%20is%20a%20stainless%20steel,essential%20infrastructure%20for%20living%20support (accessed August 7, 2026).

^[6] Climate Rights Interview with Dian Wana Utami, May 4, 2026, Tani Indah, Southeast Sulawesi.

^[7] On July 31, 2025, the Unaaha District Court ruled that Obsidian Stainless Steel had unlawfully polluted the environment and ordered the company to transparently provide information to the community regarding pollution, repair liquid waste and emission treatment installations, eliminate sources of pollution, and restore the environment. Environmental case Number: 28/Pdt.Sus-LH/2024/PN Unh, https://putusan3.mahkamahagung.go.id/direktori/index/pengadilan/pn-unaaha/tahunjenis/putus/tahun/2025.html; Walhi, “Morosi People’s Lawsuit Granted, Court Declares PLTU Pollutes the Environment and Against the Law,” August 4, 2025, https://www.walhi.or.id/gugatan-rakyat-morosi-dikabulkan-pengadilan-nyatakan-pltu-cemari-lingkungan-dan-melawan-hukum (accessed September 29, 2025).

^[8] Mongabay, https://mongabay.co.id/2025/05/30/koalisi-sulawesi-desak-revisi-aturan-pltu-captive/ (accessed August 7. 2026)

^[9] Climate Rights International interview with Taji Intan, August 12, 2025, Tani Indah, Southeast Sulawesi.

^[10] Climate Rights International interview with Hasnia, May 4, 2026, Tani Indah, Southeast Sulawesi.

^[11] Dust money is compensation for air pollution and other local impacts provided by mining companies to local governments to disperse to residents.

^[12] Climate Rights International interview with Jumatin, May 5, 2026, Tapunggaya, Southeast Sulawesi.

^[13] Aditya Hadi,” Govt suspends nickel mining in Mandiodo Block amid graft probe,” Jakarta Post, Aug. 14, 2023, https://www.thejakartapost.com/business/2023/08/14/govt-suspends-nickel-mining-in-mandiodo-block-amid-graft-probe.html.

^[14] Fajar Ramadhan, “Antam Patok Target Produksi Bijih Nikel 18,1 Juta Ton Tahun 2026,” Asatunews, April 14, 2026, https://www.asatunews.co.id/antam-target-produksi-nikel-2026 (accessed August 26, 2026).

^[15] Climate Rights International interview with Nurtina, August 15, 2025, Tapunggaya, Southeast Sulawesi.

^[16] Mongabay, “Landslide deaths again highlight safety failures in Indonesia’s nickel industry,” May 1, 2025, https://news.mongabay.com/2025/05/landslide-deaths-again-highlight-safety-failures-in-indonesias-nickel-industry/; Databoks, “2023 Update: Morowali Regency’s PDRB per capita based on ADHB is Rp. 927.23 million,” October 22, 2024, https://databoks.katadata.co.id/en/pdb/statistics/d39016a3083d6a9/2023-update-morowali-regencys-pdrb-per-capita-based-on-adhb-is-rp-92723-million (accessed August 25, 2026).

^[17] Inside Indonesia, “From the dust of Morowali,” April 28, 2025, https://www.insideindonesia.org/editions/edition-159-jan-mar-2025/from-the-dust-of-morowali; AEER, “Perusahaan-Perusahaan Multinasional dan Hilirisasi Nikel di Indonesia,” 2023, https://www.aeer.or.id/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Perusahaan-perusahaan-Multinasional-dan-Hilirisasi-Nikel-di-Indonesia.pdf (accessed August 24, 2026).

^[18] Tempo, https://www.tempo.co/ekonomi/aeer-hilirisasi-nikel-tak-kurangi-kemiskinan-95-persen-pendapatan-morowali-menguap-ke-luar-daerah--139443 (accessed August 7, 2026).

^[19] Nickel Industries, “Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP),” https://nickelindustries.com/section/indonesia-morowali-industrial-park-imip/ (accessed October 1, 2025); IUCN-NL, “Nickel Mining-Related Sustainability Impact at Landscape-level in Morowali, Indonesia,” June 2025, https://www.iucn.nl/app/uploads/2025/07/Morowali-report-IUCN-NL-finale-versie-high-res.pdf (accessed October 6, 2025).

^[20] Climate Rights International interview with Gusnah, August 22, 2025, Kurisa, Central Sulawesi.

^[21] Climate Rights Interview with Esti, May 7, 2026, Kurisa, Central Sulawesi.

^[22] “Anisa” is a pseudonym.

^[23] Climate Rights International interview with “Anisa,” August 22, 2025, Labota, Morowali, Central Sulawesi

^[24] Tenggara Strategics, The Jakarta Post, "Analysis: Safety standards under scrutiny after explosion in Morowali," January 10, 2024, https://www.thejakartapost.com/opinion/2024/01/10/analysis-safety-standards-under-scrutiny-after-explosion-in-morowali (accessed August 7, 2026).

^[25] Climate Rights International interview with “Anisa,” August 22, 2025, Labota, Central Sulawesi.

^[26] Climate Rights International interview with Sunarti, August 20, 2025, Tompira, Central Sulawesi.

^[27] Climate Rights International interview with Ribka, August 20, 2025, Molino, Central Sulawesi.

^[28] Climate Rights International interview with Arman Marunduh, August 20, 2025, Molino, Central Sulawesi.

^[29] Climate Rights International interview with Diana, August 24, 2025 and May 8, 2026, Morombo Pantai, Southeast Sulawesi.

^[30] Environmental Protection and Management Law (Law No 32/2009), https://climate-laws.org/documents/law-32-2009-environmental-protection-and-management_9391.

^[31] Climate Rights International interview with Diana, May 8, 2026, Morombo Pantai, Southeast Sulawesi.

^[32] Climate Rights International interview with Utete, May 8, 2026, Morombo Pantai, Southeast Sulawesi.

^[33] Climate Rights International interview with Diana, August 24, 2025, Morombo Pantai, Southeast Sulawesi.