Indonesia is a country
that is highly prone to hazards due to its geographical position. Historical
disaster data have shown that the country has experienced numerous major
disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides and volcanic eruptions.
Indonesia’s position in the equatorial zone with its tropical climate that has
two seasons poses other potential hazards: floods, land mass movement,
windstorms, drought, forest and land fires, and diseases and epidemics.
Recently
the global climate change has also started to have impacts on many areas in the
archipelago. Climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of
climate-related hazards, increased the vulnerability of the poor, and decreased
the capacity of many in dealing with hazardous events. It has influences over
critical sectors like health, water, food, livelihood, education and
infrastructure.
With the advent of the
above-mentioned new challenges, disaster management may not be conducted in the
old conventional way, instead it has to be designed with a longer-term
perspective and integrated into the national development. In other words,
Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation need to be mainstreamed
into development agenda both at the national and local levels. At the praxis
level, however, the issues of disaster risk reduction and climate change
adaptation are new to most communities, governments and civil society
organizations alike. Implementation of DRR and CCA-related programs and
activities has still been viewed as two distinct and separate issues.
At the grassroots
level, communities face the growing challenge of increased hazards due to
climate change. This requires them to develop strategies to adapt to the
changing environment. Although the strategies developed are not necessarily
considered as risk reduction activities, these adaptation efforts create coping
mechanisms that may contribute to building their resilience to disaster.
Adaptive
behaviors were born from communities’ interaction with their environment
through the values, knowledge, beliefs and various communal activities lived by
communities in their culture. These value systems may take the form of myths,
legends or any kind of rituals that constitute their local wisdoms. Local
wisdoms that are directly related to the environment and people’s livelihoods
very often define their resilience to disaster.
At the community level,
there was still scant understanding of DRR and CCA terminologies. Most people
had not understood the direct relation between disaster and climate change.
They did not know the basic concept of climate change, let alone the relation
between the two. Climate change was mostly understood as a change in daily
temperature or irregularities in the raining season, and appearance of
windstorms and unusually high sea waves. People tended to find it difficult to
come to terms with complicated terminologies in disaster risk reduction and
climate change. The impacts of disaster and climate change, however, had been
felt by grassroots communities, with the prolonged drought, access to water
that was getting difficult, uncertainty of planting time, increased abrasion, crop
failure and decreased farm products, increased forest fires, lost livelihoods,
and increased poverty.
Since there was little
understanding of integrated DRR and CCA at the community level, activities
implemented by the community members tended to be their natural response to
mitigate the adverse impacts of an event. The interaction between communities
and nature created a local system of knowledge, values, beliefs, myths and
legends. Communities in Java Island, for instance, developed local wisdom in
predicting climate that was called pranata
mangsa (literally arrangement of seasons). This was used for determining the right time for the people to
plant and the right varieties to plant at a certain period of time. A similar
system was developed by Sangir communities in Sangihe Island, North Sulawesi in
interpreting natural signs to decide the right time to go to sea and other
activities.
A study by an NGO,
Bingkai Indonesia and UNESCO in Lipang Island, North Sulawesi at the edge of
the Pacific Ocean, found that people once affected by the impacts of sea level
rise and marine abrasion moved to higher grounds and developed certain dwelling
structure that faced the land to avoid strong winds from the sea. For
protective purposes, members of the local community also planted two plant
varieties, Palem Nipa (Nypa fruticans)
and Almond (Terminalia cattapa) along
the coastal lines. To maintain their level of fish catch, fisher communities
moved to other parts of the island after observing a change in fish migration
pattern. All these initiatives showed that local communities in Lipang Island
had developed their own adaptation measures.
In
Simeulu Island, Aceh communities possessed knowledge about potential Tsunami through
the Smong story that was handed over across generations through bed-time
stories and traditional performance arts: Nanga-Nanga, sikambang and
nandong.
Smong
had become
an identifying collective memory of communities in Simeulue Island. Pieces of poetry
about Smong might
be found in babies lullabies in the island.
The Civil Society Forum for Climate Justice (CFS)
found that farmers and fishers living in the northern coasts of Java Island,
particularly in Pandansari areas, Brebes, Central
Java were able to adapt to extreme weather change by changing the paddy variety
they planted with one that was more adaptable to salty water; the variety that
was also planted by their predecessors. A similar situation might be found in
Yogyakarta where the local communities developed local plant varieties that
were more resilient to reduce the potential of crop failure. In Central
Kalimantan, people used a traditional slash and burn technique to clear land, Sekat
Bakar, in which community
members cleared the land in line with a number of traditional precepts and
watched the process closely so as not to trigger forest fires. In several areas
in Central Java and North Sulawesi there was a ban on catching fish in certain
seasons, which probably was related to weather condition that might make it
dangerous to go to sea. Such prohibition might also be found in Pengastulan
Village, Buleleng, Bali where community members were not allowed to go to sea
during certain ceremonies. These beliefs were the results of people’s
interaction with the environment over the years.
[1] Chief of Statistics Indonesia
(BPS), Wed 3/2/2010; http://www.jpnn.com/index.php?mib=berita.detail&id= 57455,
accessed on 19 July 2012
[2] Ministry of Home Affairs,
2004
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