The late 2025 Sumatra hydrometeorological disasters have sparked a nationwide debate in Indonesia, reframing such events not as natural hazards but as politically produced disasters. While driven by an unusual tropical cyclone formation, namely Cyclone Senyar, the scale of its direct damage is estimated at around 20 per cent. The majority of the impact is attributable to environmental and institutional factors; decades of palm oil-driven deforestation, watershed disruption, chronic underfunding of disaster mitigation, and fragmented institutional coordination have significantly amplified vulnerability and exposure. The cyclone served more as a trigger exposing structural issues.

^{Image via https://big.go.id/bencanasumatra/}

Alongside Kalimantan, Sumatra has been a hotspot of palm oil capitalism exerted by Soeharto’s New Order regime since the 1980s. The state concentrated land concessions in the hands of private and foreign companies that dominate global palm oil production by dispossessing indigenous community forests through codification of agrarian law. Sumatra accounts roughly 50% of crude palm oil (CPO) production, sustaining the country’s output of around 47 million tonnes and its 54% share of global supply in 2023. The scale of land use conversion sits at a staggering figure. Between 1990 and 2024, Sumatra lost 1.2 million hectares of its forest to palm oil plantations, spanning Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra province. These reconfigured ecological systems made the region vulnerable to hydrometeorological disasters. The large-scale land conversion disrupts infiltration and water retention, increasing surface runoff and sedimentation, thus reducing the landscape’s capacity to buffer extreme rainfall and landslide risks.

Indonesia's ambition to boost foreign direct investment to achieve an 8% growth target has made land use a contested domain between its role as an engine for investment and ecological buffer for disaster mitigation. This is especially pronounced when certain regions, large parcels of land, a coastal area, or indigenous forests are designated as National Strategic Project (PSN), in line with development agendas of two political regimes under former president Joko Widodo and his successor Prabowo Subianto in advancing Indonesia’s trajectory towards state-led capitalism. Technocratically, this political ambition often clashes with disaster-based fiscal projections with development planning. Several policy instruments, such as the nationwide Disaster Risk Index (RBI), are not yet actionable for prioritising disaster risk reduction (DRR) investments or for designing disaster fiscal reserves. Trickling down to subnational level, local governments become reluctant to incorporate disaster risk into planning processes. In some cases, there is concern that recognition of high-risk areas may deter investment or reduce land and property values. This creates political and economic bias toward short-term land-based growth, whilst overlooking land use planning as long-term disaster mitigation strategy.

Prior to Sumatra disasters, austerity measures imposed since January 2025 further cut disaster risk management funding by 43% which in turn caused reduced technical assistance to local governments in preparing and updating Disaster Risk Assessments (KRB). Disaster mitigation is among the critical sectors that have been compromised, with budget allocations redirected toward the current regime’s populist programmes e.g. Free Meal Program (MBG) and Koperasi Merah Putih. It foregrounds politics of allocation as central issues in disaster funding, raising concerns on the state’s commitment to building safety and preparedness in the country where 3,000–4,000 disaster events can occur annually. Even without austerity, the lack of commitment is reflected in chronic underfunding over the past 15 years. As shown in the graph below, spending on emergency response and relief (realisation) has consistently exceeded allocation for mitigation, characterising a reactive instead of preventive measures as the ideal approach to disaster management.

^{Image: Author’s analysis from CNBC Indonesia, visualisation improved using Gemini AI}

Altogether, these factors compound governance failures in responding to climate extremes affecting cross-institutional coordination. This was evident in the case of Cyclone Senyar; early warnings were issued by the Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics (BMKG) eight days in advance and repeated at four- and two-day intervals. Yet the warnings were not consistently acted upon by the corresponding central and local governments. Under fiscal constraints, including austerity measures, disaster management authorities face reduced operational capacity, limited technical support, and weakened incentives to prioritise preparedness. Early warnings did not translate into timely preventive and emergency response, on top of other existing factors such as lack of public disaster education and weak cross-agency communication.    

Governing the Next Climate Extremes

Humanitarian crises rapidly spread across Sumatra in the aftermath of major flash floods and landslides between 24-26 November 2025. Limited or no access to districts and villages, mostly in remote areas made rescue and aid delivery challenging. First responders lost critical golden time (typically within 72 hours) affecting 53 cities/ regencies and led to 2,578 families being displaced and 1,208 deaths. In absence of adequate state response, many communities depend on mutual help and grassroots mobilisation, giving rise to initiatives such as #KorbanTolongKorban (victims help victims) and #WargaBantuWarga (citizens help citizens). Hashtags emerged as crowdfunding campaigns and solidarity movements; survivors in affected areas turned into volunteers providing evacuation support, communication access, food, shelter and medicine at their own capacity as they waited for aid after local governments declared a shutdown.

Too often, self-help coping mechanisms act as the only option when governments fail to deliver their responsibilities. However, it masks a deeper process of responsibilisation where community resilience is mobilised as a governing strategy that shifts state responsibility and provisioning to the affected peoples. For the people of Aceh, for instance, their perceived resilience is rooted in the trauma of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and their crisis adaptation for having coped with devastating impacts of the disaster.

^{Image: Floods in Padang Panjang, West Sumatra, Indonesia in November 2025. Credit: Rahmatdenas via Wikimedia Commons}

Scholars have increasingly argued that the concept and application of resilience warrant critical scrutiny. Community social capital and adaptive capacity have been widely accepted as key indicators for building disaster resilience and are commonly operationalised in risk assessments as: Risk = (Hazard × Exposure × Vulnerability) / Capacity. However, it can risk instrumentalising people’s resilience, particularly in the context of responsibilisation, and potentially obscuring systemic causes of disasters. Patronising people’s resilience within extractive economies, chronic underinvestment, and weak governance can place communities in faux frais, where they absorb the costs of disasters actively produced by broken political-economic system. This builds on Maria Kaika’s critical concept of immunology which examines the promotion of resilience in the New Urban Agenda as to “vaccinate people and environments alike so that they are able to take larger doses of inequality and environmental degradation in the future”.

Sumatra has shown to us that governing climate extremes cannot be reduced to technical proficiency of early warning systems. Instead, disaster management failures are rooted in the persistent lack of care, underestimation of risk, fragmented institutions, and weak disaster funding ecosystems. Governing the next climate extremes requires an economic approach that works with people and the environment, rather than against them. It also requires dissecting the political economy of disasters, where land use, fiscal priorities, and development agendas systematically shape who is exposed, who is protected, and who is left to cope. The next step is not only to respond better to disasters, but also to address the structural conditions that produce vulnerability in the first place. Only by realigning governance, investment, and accountability toward long-term systemic resilience can climate extremes be managed in ways that are both more effective and just.