480 4 FEBRUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6580 science.org SCIENCEIMAGE: AFP PHOTO/NYOMAN NUARTAsubmerged by 2050, says Edvin Aldrian, a
climatologist at Indonesia’s National Re-
search and Innovation Agency.
Moving the seat of government and its es-
timated 4.8 million workers won’t lighten Ja-
karta’s burdens much, Aldrian says. “Jakarta
will still be the economic center of Indonesia
... and still have to take on its social issues
and environmental issues,” Goh says.
Meanwhile, the $32 billion new capital,
whose construction can now get underway,
will have an environmental impact on Bor-
neo. Nusantara, to be built in stages through
2045, will cover 2560 km^2 , about twice the
area of New York City. (The government
will occupy a 66-km^2 core.) Like the United
States, Brazil, and other countries that built
new capitals from scratch, Indonesia hopes
to create a city that is modern, rationally
planned, and—in Indonesia’s case—green,
with net-zero emissions. But critics are
skeptical, because Indonesia’s renewable
energy sector currently provides just 11.5%
of national energy. Environmental groups
worry that as a stopgap Nusantara could
rely on power from Kalimantan’s numerous
coal-fired power plants. And although well-
designed public transport might keep cars
off its roads, there will likely be extensive
air travel between the new capital and Ja-
karta, about 1300 kilometers away.
The impact on Borneo’s ecology could be
substantial. An island the size of California,
Borneo features coastal mangroves, forests,
swamps, and mountains, hosting numerous
endemic and rare species. Nusantara itself
will be built on a previously cleared site and
rely on existing highways, power lines, and
other infrastructure. The city also lies inland,
allowing for shoreline mangrove restora-
tion. River valleys will be protected, creating
what Lechner calls “green fingers” reaching
through the city.
But the worry is that Nusantara will trig-
ger sprawl beyond the city limits and devel-
opment across Borneo. Spurring economic
growth is, after all, one of the goals. By study-
ing the increase in nighttime lights associ-
ated with 12 previously relocated capitals,
including Brasília and Naypyidaw, Myanmar,
Lechner and his colleagues found that they
burgeoned initially, then grew more slowly.
“Our assessment suggests that it is likely that
[Nusantara’s] direct footprint could grow
rapidly, expanding over 10 kilometers from
its core in less than two decades and over
30 kilometers before mid-century,” the team
reported in 2020 in the journal Land.
The impacts are likely to go farther afield.
The roads connecting Brasília to Brazil’s
coastal population centers “facilitated the de-
struction of the Amazon rainforest,” Lechner
says, opening undisturbed territory to wild-
life poaching, illegal logging, and land clear-
ing. There are fewer cities to connect to on
Borneo, home to only 18 million people, but
“clearly the new city will attract economic ac-
tivity, including new roads, which are known
to cause deforestation,” says David Gaveau, a
landscape ecologist who heads TheTreeMap,
a company that studies tropical deforestation.
Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Bor-
neo, has already lost about 30% of its origi-
nal forest cover to land clearing and fires
since 1973, Gaveau says, leaving the Bornean
orangutan and the proboscis monkey endan-
gered and many other species threatened.
A highway under construction called the
Trans-Kalimantan Northern link “cuts right
through remote pristine forests in the heart
of Borneo,” he says. Encouragingly, more ef-
fective law enforcement and a moratorium
on new plantations helped drive 2020 defor-
estation to its lowest level in 17 years, Gaveau
says, but new roads to and from Nusantara
could reverse the trend.
The Indonesian government has not
said much about Nusantara’s environmen-
tal burden. Gaveau and others hope it will
offset the city’s impact with a similarly am-
bitious effort to turn the tide elsewhere in
Kalimantan. “The solution lies in restoring
all those degraded lands back to their origi-
nal state: forest,” Gaveau says. jPlans for Nusantara include lots of green space and a palace in the shape of Garuda, a mythical birdlike creature.O
n 7 December 2021, as the Omicron
variant of the pandemic coronavirus
began to pummel the world, scientists
officially identified a related strain.
BA.2 differed by about 40 mutations
from the original Omicron lineage,
BA.1, but it was causing so few cases of
COVID-19 that it seemed a sideshow to its
rampaging counterpart.
“I was thinking: ‘BA.1 has the upper
hand. We’ll never hear again from BA.2,’”
recalls Mark Zeller, a genomic epidemio-
logist at the Scripps Research Institute.
Eight weeks later, he says, “Clearly that’s
not the case. ... I’m pretty sure [BA.2] is go-
ing to be everywhere in the world, that it’s
going to sweep and will be the dominant
variant soon in most countries if not all.”
Zeller and other scientists are now try-
ing to make sense of why BA.2 is explod-
ing and what its emergence means for the
Omicron surge and the pandemic overall.
Already a U.K. report issued last week and
a large household study from Denmark
posted this week as a preprint make it clear
BA.2 is inherently more transmissible than
BA.1, leaving scientists to wonder which of
its distinct mutations confer an advantage.
But so far, BA.2 does not appear to be
making people sicker than BA.1, which it-
self poses less risk of severe disease than
variants such as Delta and Beta. In Den-
mark, where by 21 January BA.2 accounted
for 65% of new COVID-19 cases, “We see
a continuous, steep decline in the num-
ber of intensive care unit patients and ...
now a decrease in the number of hospital
admissions related to SARS-CoV-2,” says
Tyra Grove Krause, an infectious disease
epidemiologist at the country’s public
health agency. In fact, the Danish govern-
ment is so confident the variant won’t
cause major upheaval that it lifted almostNew Omicron
begins to take
over, despite
late start
BA.2 strain may extend
latest surge, but its overall
impact remains unclear
COVID-By Meredith Wadman