Wildfires and Floods: A Lesson

Australia is in mourning. Devastating bushfires have been ravaging the continent, specifically in New South Wales (NSW), now spreading to Victoria as well. This fire season has burned millions of hectares, a new record. Dozens have died and property damage has reached hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Is Climate Change to Blame?

It didn’t take long for international media to cover the event. A few days ago, I listened to the Babbage podcast episode on Australian wildfires, featuring Catherine Brahic, environment editor at The Economist. According to Catherine, bushfires are normal in Australia, part of the dry ecosystem.

Climate change has made something that should be normal much worse.

The climate crisis has made Australia drier and hotter. This year, Australia again broke records for highest temperatures and lowest rainfall. Dry air and dry scrubland vegetation make the area highly flammable. Add the phenomenon of Dry Thunderstorms, which are quite common in Australia, and it gets even scarier. Lightning strikes, but no rain. When lightning hits a bone-dry tree and the fire is fanned by wind, it’s game over.

What About Indonesia?

It’s perfectly natural to connect this to Indonesia. Around the same time, Jakarta and its surroundings experienced severe flooding, claiming 60 lives. Rainfall during the event broke all-time records. While Australia sees dry getting drier, Jakarta appears to be experiencing the opposite: wet getting wetter.

“Areas that are currently wet, will likely become more wet. Areas that are currently dry will become more dry,” Professor Abraham said. source

I don’t need to elaborate on how massive this flood was. Plenty of national news has covered it, or you may have experienced it yourself. There has been much debate about what went wrong or could be improved, but clearly, most people agree that the climate crisis is one of the most significant contributing factors.

Problems Caused by the Climate Crisis

Several issues arise from the climate crisis. First is uncertainty. The climate crisis makes predicting extreme weather increasingly difficult. Insurance companies will also struggle to calculate risk from these changes, potentially causing premiums to rise or products to disappear entirely because they’re no longer feasible. Farmers will find it harder to predict when and how to plant.

The meteorological agency’s job becomes increasingly difficult.

The next issue is about changing habits. How buildings are constructed, building codes – everything must adapt. In Jakarta’s context, I’ve often heard stories about residents who are used to living with floods and have their own mitigation strategies, such as knowing when to evacuate and how to prepare their homes to minimize flood damage. With floods that may only get worse, whether these habits are still sufficient or need to be intensified remains to be seen.

More critically, areas that were once habitable are becoming increasingly risky, possibly to the point of requiring relocation. But we all know relocation is politically sensitive. Should the government intervene? Or leave residents there until they’re eventually forced out by nature? Currently, there doesn’t seem to be a case of rising risk levels making an area completely uninhabitable (perhaps), but this could just be a matter of time, meaning it needs to be considered now.

Politics, Politics, Politics

And of course, the biggest problem may be politics. Everyone says the government must do something, but how do you get politicians to unite and pass climate crisis mitigation regulations? In Australia, politics is a mess. Many citizens don’t care, and the politicians are mediocre. Especially since Australia is a country whose climate-crisis-contributing industries are quite large.

In Indonesia, discussion about the climate crisis is still very rare, at least not as widespread as in Australia, making it even harder to comment on. Regulation on groundwater use has never become an important issue for either central or local government. The Giant Sea Wall construction appears to have stalled, and the central government even wants to flee to a new capital at considerable expense. Cooperation between local and central governments also seems nonexistent.

Then there’s international politics. The United States recently withdrew from the Paris Agreement. Talks in Madrid also stalled. A carbon tax is still disliked by most countries.

Meanwhile, time keeps ticking, emissions keep rising, records keep being broken. If it’s difficult for all of us to reduce carbon emissions, reduce groundwater usage, and change our lifestyles, it’s only a matter of time before the Earth forces us to do all of that, in its own way.

Hopefully we’re all prepared.