Victims of the green energy boom? The Indonesians facing eviction over a China-backed plan to turn their island into a solar panel 'ecocity'

By Nikita Sud, Professor of the Politics of Development, University of Oxford

I first visited Rempang island in Summer 2022. Greeting me were lush fields lined with coconut and banana trees, picture-book fishing villages with houses jutting into the water on stilts, and boats carrying people between the dozens of islands that dot the Riau archipelago in western Indonesia. I had made the pleasant, one-hour ferry trip from bustling, glass-and-chrome Singapore. This felt like another world.

My hosts (an environmental lawyer and an indigenous Melayu community organiser) and I had reached Rempang from the economic hub of Riau Islands province: the special manufacturing,…

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