BANJAR, Indonesia – Indonesia’s government continues to review mines and plantations in the river basins of southern Borneo, months after more than 7% of the population there was impacted by flooding in December last year. “An audit is still in progress,” environment ministry spokesperson Yulia Suryanti told Mongabay Indonesia. South Kalimantan is one of five Indonesian provinces on the highly biodiverse island of Borneo, which Indonesia shares with Brunei and Malaysia. The southeastern province is particularly vulnerable to flooding during the region’s main rainy season — at least 35 people were killed during major floods that destroyed more than 100,000 homes in 2021. The population of South Kalimantan was almost 4.4 million as of the 2020 census, the most recent conducted by the government. Meanwhile, data from Indonesia’s disaster management agency showed that nearly 290,000 people were affected by the latest annual floods since the beginning of December last year. Eleven out of the 13 cities and districts that make up the province experienced flooding by January. Civil society organizations say that likely reflects wholesale destruction of old-growth forest throughout the basins of the Barito and Maluka rivers, which run through the province and out into the Java Sea. The Barito is the second-longest river in Borneo, after the Kapuas. “Across South Kalimantan, especially in the mid and lower sections of the Barito River Basin, a lot of the forest cover has been lost,” said Anggi Prayoga, a forestry campaigner at Greenpeace Indonesia. The head of the forestry department in…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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