Central Sulawesi information commission confirms AMDAL for two Tompotika nickel mines as public information

A ruling that puts the AMDAL on the public record

On Wednesday, 7 October 2026, the Central Sulawesi Information Commission (Komisi Informasi Provinsi Sulawesi Tengah, KI Sulteng) granted a request from the Tompotika Conservation Alliance Foundation (Yayasan Aliansi Konservasi Tompotika, AlTo) in case number 04/AR/PSI/KI-SLTG/V/2026. The panel, chaired by Indra A. Yosvidar with members Moh. Rizky Lembah and Santi Rahmawaty, declared that the environmental permits or environmental feasibility decisions, together with their derivative documents in the form of the Analisis Mengenai Dampak Lingkungan (AMDAL), for PT Anugerah Bangun Mamur and PT Anugerah Sumber Bumi are public information.

The commission instructed the Banggai Regency Environment Agency (Dinas Lingkungan Hidup, DLH Banggai), as respondent, to provide copies of those documents to AlTo within 14 working days of the ruling being read. ANTARA, LINGKAR.news, and Media Alkhairaat all reported the decision from Palu on the same day.

"KI Sulteng mengabulkan permohonan pemohon dari AlTo," the chair said, confirming that the commission had granted AlTo's request in full.

The case is a clear example of Indonesia's public information system doing what it was built to do. A civil society organisation asked a public body for environmental documents, the two sides went through mediation, and when mediation did not settle the matter, an independent commission adjudicated and issued a clear, time-bound order. Nobody had to go to court. The outcome strengthens the position of every party that relies on the AMDAL, including the agency that holds it and the companies that prepared it.

How the request moved through the system

The request dates to May 2026, when AlTo asked for copies of the environmental approvals and AMDAL documents for nickel mining companies operating around the Tompotika area of Banggai Regency. ANTARA reported on 9 July 2026 that the request had moved to KI Sulteng and that mediation had not produced an agreement, so the matter proceeded to adjudication. The process took roughly six months from first request to final ruling.

That sequence follows the path laid out in Law No. 14 of 2008 on Public Information Disclosure (UU KIP), which sets out who may request information, what public bodies must provide, and how disputes are resolved through information commissions at national and provincial level. On the environmental side, Government Regulation No. 22 of 2021 on the Implementation of Environmental Protection and Management (PP 22/2021) places the AMDAL inside the environmental approval process and treats public involvement and environmental information systems as part of that process. The KI Sulteng ruling sits comfortably within both frameworks: it confirms that an approved AMDAL, once it underpins a government decision, belongs to the public record.

AlTo framed the result in constructive terms. Aditia Bagus Santoso, AlTo's interim Indonesia programme manager, said the decision supports public information openness and transparent, accountable governance, including in environmental management, and expressed the hope that the respondent would implement it so that AlTo can strengthen its protection work for the forests of Mount Tompotika.

The landscape behind the documents

The documents matter because of where the concessions sit. The Tompotika area, in and around Bualemo District on the eastern arm of Sulawesi, combines farmland, villages, and forested mountain slopes that remain habitat for species found only in Sulawesi. Mongabay Indonesia, reporting in March 2026, listed the maleo (Macrocephalon maleo), the babirusa (Babyrousa babyrussa), the lowland anoa, the bear cuscus, the knobbed hornbill, and the Dian's tarsier among the wildlife recorded in the landscape. AlTo has linked its document request directly to protecting the habitat of the maleo and babirusa around Mount Tompotika.

Public reporting gives a sense of the scale of mineral interest. ANTARA reported in July that PT Anugerah Bangun Makmur (ABM) holds a mining business permit (IUP) of 4,335 hectares, alongside other permit holders in the wider Tompotika area including PT Prima Bangun Persada Nusantara (6,689 ha), PT Merpati Pratama Sukses (2,307 ha), PT Core Mineral Resources (2,030 ha), PT Bumi Persada Surya Pratama (1,861 ha), PT Penta Dharma (1,220 ha), PT Prima Dharma Karsa (938 ha), and PT Integra Mining Nusantara Indonesia (199 ha). Kabar Sulteng reported in October that at least 10 nickel IUPs had been issued around Bualemo District as of June 2026.

A spatial overlay by the Mining Advocacy Network of Central Sulawesi (JATAM Sulteng), which compared WIUP boundaries from the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources portal with provincial forest maps, found that 11,468.62 hectares of concession area, about 81.11 percent of the area analysed, lies within designated forest zones. The breakdown is 12.77 hectares of protected forest, 6,239.44 hectares of production forest, 554.10 hectares of convertible production forest, and 4,662.30 hectares of limited production forest. In the same analysis, Kabar Sulteng reported 3,509.44 hectares of the ABM concession (86.23 percent) inside forest zones, while no forest-zone overlap was recorded for PT Anugerah Sumber Bumi. These figures describe permit boundaries, not cleared land, and they are exactly the kind of baseline the AMDAL itself should help confirm or refine.

Water is the other part of the picture. Kabar Sulteng reported that 923 households in four villages draw on PDAM piped water whose source lies within the concession landscape: 338 households in Bualemo A, 337 in Bualemo B, 135 in Longkoga Timur, and 113 in Sampaka.

From disclosure to valuation

For Sirkularium, the significance of the ruling lies in what an open AMDAL makes possible. An AMDAL contains the project description, the environmental baseline, the predicted impacts, and the management and monitoring commitments that a company has agreed with the regulator. Once that document is public, it stops being a compliance file in a cabinet and becomes a common reference point.

An AMDAL in the public record is the starting line for every credible valuation of the forests, water, and wildlife it describes.

That starting line has direct economic meaning. Indonesia already has a standard method for putting a monetary value on environmental change: Permen LH No. 7 Tahun 2014 on environmental loss due to pollution or damage, which separates ecological damage, environmental economic loss, and recovery cost. Applying it well depends on a credible baseline. For the Tompotika concessions, the relevant ecosystem services are easy to name: forest cover and carbon storage across the production and limited production forest zones, habitat value for endemic species such as the maleo and babirusa, and the provisioning service of the water sources that supply the 923 PDAM households. GIS and remote-sensing data can map land cover and change across the 11,468.62 hectares inside forest zones; the AMDAL supplies the agreed baseline and the monitoring indicators against which that change is measured.

When regulators, companies, and communities can all read the same baseline, they can also agree on what success looks like. A company that meets its AMDAL commitments has a documented basis for saying so. A regulator monitoring compliance has a shared reference that communities recognise. A conservation organisation such as AlTo can focus its effort on specific habitats and indicators rather than on obtaining documents.

A note on the record

Sources differ on some details, and Sirkularium records them here rather than choosing silently. The ruling coverage from ANTARA and LINGKAR.news spells the first company as PT Anugerah Bangun Mamur, while Media Alkhairaat, ANTARA's July report, and Kabar Sulteng use PT Anugerah Bangun Makmur. ANTARA's July report places ABM's operations in Siuna Village, Pagimana District, while Kabar Sulteng reporting from September locates the ABM concession in Sampaka Village, Bualemo District. The eight individual IUP areas listed by ANTARA in July sum to 19,579 hectares. Mongabay's March 2026 analysis of six IUPs covering 13,243 hectares used an earlier permit set than the June 2026 overlay of 10 IUPs cited above, so the two forest-overlap figures are not directly comparable. AlTo's spokesperson is described as interim Indonesia programme manager by ANTARA and as Indonesia programme manager elsewhere.

Sirkularium's view

The KI Sulteng ruling is a transparency milestone for Central Sulawesi and a useful precedent for mining regions across Indonesia. It shows the information disclosure system resolving a question cleanly, through mediation and then adjudication, with a clear deadline and a clear result. DLH Banggai now has a straightforward path to compliance, and its timely handover of the documents will itself be a strong signal of good governance.

For government and public institutions, the practical lesson is that AMDAL documents for mining projects can be treated as public by default, published proactively through the environmental information systems envisaged under PP 22/2021, rather than released case by case. Doing so lowers the cost of information requests for everyone and builds trust between regulators, operators, and communities.

For mining operators in Banggai and elsewhere, a public AMDAL is an opportunity. Sirkularium recommends that companies pair it with an independently verified economic valuation that combines GIS and ground data on forest cover, endemic species habitat, and water sources, using the Permen LH No. 7 Tahun 2014 methodology, and update that valuation as operations proceed. Treated as ongoing practice rather than a response to a dispute, valuation gives operators a defensible record and gives regulators and communities a shared figure to monitor against. What to watch next is the handover itself within the 14 working day window, and whether other regencies in Central Sulawesi move toward proactive AMDAL publication.