How Government Inaction Turned Sumatra’s Rains Into a National Catastrophe

The Indonesian political system has enabled deforestation through weak oversight, opaque licensing, and regulations designed to favor extractive industries.

Floods and mudslides engulf the Twin Bridges in Padang Panjang, West Sumatra, Indonesia, Nov. 27, 2025.

Across the Indonesian island of Sumatra, entire communities remain trapped. Months after the devastating floods of November 2025, families are still displaced, aid distribution remains uneven, and anger is growing over what many Indonesians see not simply as a climate disaster, but as a political one.

During the floods, villages disappeared under water, landslides tore through hillsides, and families waited days – sometimes weeks – for help that never came. While communities struggled to survive, protests erupted across Indonesia over worsening governance failures, environmental destruction, and political repression. By the end of December, the death toll had risen to over 1,150, with many more missing and nearly 400,000 people displaced. The floods also exposed the consequences of decades of corruption, deregulation, and state-backed destruction of Sumatra’s forests.

A Disaster Years in the Making

In Sumatra, rain has always come in cycles. Rivers swell, soils absorb water, and forests regulate the flow. For generations, these ecosystems acted as natural flood defenses. But over the past two decades, those ecological protections have been systematically destroyed. Forests have been cleared on an industrial scale, and watersheds degraded. Rivers have been choked with sediment from upstream erosion. Vast oil palm plantations and mining concessions have replaced landscapes that once absorbed rainfall and stabilised soil.

Between 2017 and 2023 alone, more than 330,000 hectares of forest were cleared for oil palm expansion. Over the past two decades, mining has contributed to the loss of more than 1 million hectares of forest, including protected areas. Without forest cover, rainwater rushes across exposed land, overwhelming rivers and triggering floods and landslides.

At the center of the crisis is a political system that has enabled deforestation through weak oversight, opaque licensing, and regulations designed to favor extractive industries.

Since the late New Order era, successive governments have revised forestry, plantation, and mining laws to facilitate large-scale commercial exploitation of forest land. Instead of strengthening environmental safeguards as climate risks increased, authorities repeatedly weakened them. This culminated in the 2020 Omnibus Law on Job Creation, which streamlined licensing procedures and accelerated the conversion of forest land into commercial concessions classified as “Other Use Areas.”

Permits for plantations, mining, and infrastructure projects were issued inside forest zones, at times retroactively legalizing activities that had previously been unlawful.

Since 2024, a few new policies have directly strengthened forest protection. Regulatory reforms have instead focused on institutional restructuring, including the re-establishment of the Ministry of Forestry (Presidential Regulation 175/2024) and a new forestry revenue regulation (PP 36/2024). At the same time, public concern has intensified over the legalization (pemutihan) of oil palm plantations operating illegally inside forest areas under Articles 110A and 110B of the Job Creation Law, mechanisms reportedly used by more than 1,000 companies.

Licensing and environmental assessment processes have also long faced criticism over corruption risks, weak oversight, and allegations involving politically exposed individuals with beneficial ownership in plantation and mining companies. In some cases, operations accused of violating environmental laws were later regularized through government-backed schemes with limited transparency or public scrutiny.

The primary beneficiaries of these policies have been large-scale plantation and extractive corporations. Oil palm companies........

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