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Opinion: BNPB Needs to Calculate Landscape Changes in Disaster Risk Studies

Reporting by Mongabay IndonesiaRead the original at mongabay.co.id

Executive Summary

Forest and land fires continue across Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Papua, with data showing 11,929 hot spots identified between August 1 and 28, 2023. A significant portion of these hot spots, 50.4%, are located in concessions, palm oil plantations, timber utilization, and mining areas. While the presence of hot spots in concessions does not automatically prove corporate culpability, the distribution reveals a link between fire risk and land use changes over time. Similar to flooding, extreme rainfall is a trigger, but the resulting disaster severity is also determined by factors like forest cover, catchment area conditions, and upstream landscape changes. The risk assessment system, while established through regulations like BNPB Regulation No. 2/2012 using hazard, vulnerability, and capacity components, appears focused on existing conditions rather than capturing dynamic, time-dependent processes of landscape change that drive risk formation.

Facts Only

* Forest and land fires continue to spread in Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Papua.
* Eleven thousand nine hundred twenty-nine hot spots were found between August 1 and 28.
* Fifty point four percent of hot spots are located in concessions, palm oil plantations, timber utilization, and mining.
* Field verification is emphasized by the Ministry of Forestry to confirm the cause of burning.
* Disaster Risk Assessment (DRA) uses components of hazard, vulnerability, and capacity for risk calculation.
* Vulnerability includes social factors like population density, poverty, age groups, and disabilities.
* Environmental vulnerability considers land cover types such as protected forests, natural forests, mangroves, swamps, and scrublands.
* Risk assessment guidelines focus on existing conditions (exposure, affected assets, environmental area, coping capacity).
* Hazard parameters for fires include forest types, climate conditions, and soil types.
* Research in mining areas showed that clearing of forests and changes in catchment areas intertwined with increased flood problems.
* Landscape changes over time—such as concession expansion or deforestation—are underrepresented in current risk calculations.

Full Take

The tension between assessing static risk conditions and understanding dynamic risk formation represents a critical gap in disaster management frameworks. Current Disaster Risk Assessment (DRA) methods rely on measuring existing vulnerabilities and hazards, which is useful for immediate response planning, but they fail to explicitly quantify the underlying processes—specifically landscape change driven by economic activities—that actively generate or escalate future risks. The analysis of forest fires and flooding demonstrates that hazard metrics alone are insufficient; the historical trajectory of land use modification, deforestation, and upstream catchment degradation must be integrated as "underlying disaster risk drivers." This suggests a necessary evolution in risk calculation from a descriptive tool to a predictive one that incorporates temporal change. If current policies do not account for how development decisions create risk through landscape alteration, they risk misallocating resources toward mitigation of symptoms rather than addressing root causes. The momentum cited for revising the guidelines indicates an opening to embed this temporal analytical layer, moving beyond mere data collection to modeling the feedback loop between human activity and environmental vulnerability. The central implication is that true preventive disaster management requires understanding not just who is exposed, but what forces are actively reshaping the environment that determines future exposure.

From the original · Mongabay Indonesia

Forest and land fires (karhutla) continue to spread in Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Papua to this day. The Kompas Data team found 11,929 hot spots between August 1 and 28, with 50.4% located in concessions, from palm oil plantations, timber utilization, and mining.

Read the full story at mongabay.co.id

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