After a holiday due to flooding on Thursday (16/2), teaching and learning activities resumed at state senior high school SMAN 8 Bukit Duri in Tebet, South Jakarta, Friday (17/2). In the morning the students took part to dry the school yard from the flooding.
Unless we can fix environmental degradation, the public must be ready to face frequent floods, landslides and wind storms.
Kompas has time and time again reported about floods and landslides that have happened in several regions throughout the country. The National Disaster Mitigation Agency recorded that floods and landslides have hit 34 regencies and cities across the country over the course of a week. From January to the middle of February, there have been 450 natural disasters caused by floods, landslides and wind storms, claiming 60 lives, injuring 178 others and negatively impacting up to 492,642 people.
The mishaps took place under normal precipitation, indicating a worsening of environmental conditions.
Indonesia, an archipelagic country with hundreds of volcanic mountains, is located between the Pacific and Eurasian Plates. Therefore, natural disasters, as a result of volcanic eruptions followed by earthquakes that sometimes cause tsunamis, are certainties. We are also aware that some regions in the country are prone to landslides due to their soil structure.
Global warming is affecting climate change, which is caused by human activities. We feel the impact: the rise of the sea level and a growing frequency of wind storms.
The impact of human activities in hindering environmental conditions has been proven by recurrent landslides and floods that take longer to subside, causing financial losses to a number of regions.
Garut, a West Java city, was devastated by flash floods from the Cimanuk River on September 21, 2016. It turned out that the Cimanuk watershed had been converted into a public vegetable planting ground. A similar case also happened in the flash floods of Bima in West Nusa Tenggara.
The damage of watersheds was not done by poor farmers who needed plots to earn their livelihood, but by upper middle class people in Puncak, West Java. Land owners and law enforcer personnel have illegally cleared several areas of the province’s conservation forests.
We cannot solely blame poor farmers for illegally using watersheds. In Java, farmers must be relocated from farm lands to labor-intensive industrial areas due to the scarcity of land availability. Population management has to be continually carried out nationwide.
We demand that the central and regional governments map out space to prevent greedy control over land, lest nature will react in unimaginable ways.
