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Listen to today's global podcastIndonesia's nickel industry went from one active mining license in 2005 to 408 at its peak in 2022 — and the island paying the price has never exported a single battery.
On Labengki Island, a small community of Bajau people — an Indigenous group historically known as nomadic sea fishermen — still live in stilted houses above coastal waters, casting nets into the same seas their ancestors worked. It is, for now, untouched by mining. A short distance away on Sulawesi, the contrast is already written into the landscape: deforested hills, exposed earth, and sediment-clouded water where fishing communities once thrived.
Indonesia now produces more than half the world's nickel supply, with the number of active mining licenses on Sulawesi rising from just one in 2005 to a peak of 408 in 2022, according to the most recently available government data. The slight dip in 2023 reflects government efforts to regulate the sector and manage oversupply, not a retreat from ambition. Most of that nickel goes to stainless steel production; the remainder feeds battery supply chains for electric vehicles and data centers. Indonesia's government has cast the industry as the country's path to becoming a giant in the green-energy transition — but the mining itself remains far from clean.
The human costs are landing hardest on the communities closest to the mines. In some villages, the industry has brought jobs alongside pollution; in others, it faces open resistance. NPR's team reported from six locations across Sulawesi, finding that where mining has arrived, traditional fishermen must travel farther and spend more on fuel just to find fish. Chinese companies, which control a majority of Indonesia's nickel refining capacity, have driven much of the investment — and the United States, seeking to reduce its dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains, recently struck a trade deal securing access to Indonesian nickel. The world's appetite for a cleaner energy future is being satisfied, in part, by turning someone else's blue water red.
Gobble's Take: The EV on your street is cleaner for your air — the invoice for that is being paid by a Bajau fisherman who's never owned a car.
Source: NPR World
Residents across Southeast Asian countries are voicing deep concern about President Trump and the ongoing war with Iran — a conflict unfolding far from their shores but close enough to reshape daily life. NPR's Morning Edition reported on May 7 that communities across the region are grappling with fears that ripple far beyond the battlefield.
The anxiety is geopolitical and immediate: Southeast Asia's economies are tightly woven into global shipping lanes and commodity markets that a major Middle East conflict can destabilize overnight. For people in the region, the war in Iran is not an abstraction — it is a variable that can determine what they pay for fuel, how secure their trade routes are, and whether governments they already distrust will make decisions that put them further at risk.
The story is a reminder that in a world of interlocked supply chains and superpower rivalry, the question of who started a war matters less, week by week, than who ends up absorbing its costs.
Gobble's Take: The most consequential front in the Iran war may not be in the Middle East at all — it's in every port, every fuel depot, and every household budget from Manila to Jakarta.
Source: NPR World
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