The Indonesian government wants the country to become ‘green’ by increasing the share of so-called ‘renewable energy’ to 74% of its energy matrix. This new briefing reveals and alerts about what goes behind this promise for more ‘green’ energy in Indonesia, of which a significant part is supposed to be generated by mega hydropower dams.
The briefing is based on the report Swamping the Heart of Borneo Under Water, which has been launched on January 14 2026, in Jakarta. The report focuses on one of the dam projects, in an advanced stage of construction: the Mentarang Induk Hydropower plant in the Tubu and Mentarang rivers in North Kalimantan. This project will submerge more than 22 thousand hectares of forest in the so-called ‘Heart of Borneo’and evict a total of 10 villages and settlements affecting 706 families of mainly Punan People, besides of other social damages and ecological destruction.
Lessons learnt from large-scale dam projects in South East Asia, like in the Mekong region and in Sarawak, but also further away as the Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon, show there is nothing ‘green’ about building hydropower plants. The Mentarang dam, together with another project - the Kayan hydroelectric power plant -, are primarily planned to supply energy for the so-called ‘Green’ Industrial Zone (KIHI), an industrial area in North Kalimantan. Besides, the dams are supposed to provide electricity for another mega-project: the new capital city of Indonesia (IKN) in East Kalimantan.
Rather than promoting a green transition, as claimed in the government propaganda, these projects benefit business and politics oligarchs in the first place, and continues to dispossess and displace people from their living spaces and to trigger conflicts, human rights violations and ecological destruction.
The energy transition and its ‘renewable’ energy projects – including hydroelectric power plants – are being built solely to fuel the metabolism of extractivism and capitalism, which in turn will kill the metabolism of nature and humanity.
15 January 2026
Nugal Institute for Social and Ecological Studies
World Rainforest Movement