Al Jazeera blames climate change for recent deadly flooding in Indonesia, in a post titled “Indonesia counts human cost as more climate change warnings sounded.” [emphasis, links added]
There is no justification for blaming climate change for recent flooding, as there is no long-term trend in precipitation there.
In fact, despite the title, Al Jazeera actually spends little time on the climate angle. Rather, the article describes land use and development as a major driver of recent floods.
The subtitle of the post reads “Indonesia reports 1,000 dead and close to 1 million displaced from rains, as a report points at the threat posed by climate change and ecosystem decline across Asia.”
Aside from the subtitle, the article only mentions climate change when it says the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has issued a report warning that “the impact of climate change on Asia’s water systems poses a risk to billions.”
No more detail is given in the article, in what is clearly a halfhearted attempt to link climate change to Indonesia’s recent extreme flooding. Perhaps it is to drive readership and divert attention from the true human causes for the devastation, which are almost entirely local in origin.
While it is true that the modest warming of the past century-plus has also been accompanied by more precipitation on average in some parts of the world, it is not true that it directly leads to increased flooding.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits that it has “low confidence” in even the sign of any trend towards more or less flooding.
In fact, other factors, some discussed by Al Jazeera, have a more direct connection to recent flooding than modest changes in precipitation.
Long term precipitation data for Indonesia from the World Bank Group show that, while recent years have seen elevated annual precipitation, it’s not part of a long term sustained upward trend.
Older data are spotty, but the 1960s through the 1990s had lower rainfall, with the lowest sustained point in the early 1990s. Since then, precipitation in the region has slowly recovered.
Recent years are high, but not dramatically so, and not higher than in the past when carbon dioxide levels were lower. (See figure below)
As discussed in this previous Climate Realism post about recent flooding in Southeast Asia, the region has annual and decadal fluctuations in its monsoon season that are completely natural.
The entire region has always been extremely flood-prone as part of the natural, large-scale regional tropical climate.
Early in the Al Jazeera article, the outlet admits as much, pointing out that Indonesia’s rainy season “frequently brings severe flooding.” They do not claim that this is historically unusual.
However, the article gets interesting when it emphasizes multiple times that “rapid deforestation, unregulated development, and degraded river basins have increased the risks” of flooding.
Failures to fund important infrastructure projects, like water, flood, and sewage management, are also blamed, as is “conversion of land to other uses.”
Rice is a staple crop in Indonesia because the region can rely on pooling water and a lot of rain, which means it is naturally prone to flooding.
When land that was once used to grow rice is paved over, there is no longer anywhere for the water to go, except down the new streets and into homes and businesses.
This is a major problem for cities, towns, and villages located in river basins and flood-prone areas, not just in Indonesia but everywhere in the world.
Deforestation contributes to the damage caused when it rains hard, too. Because tree roots that once held the soil and loose rock in place on the mountainsides of Indonesia are removed, when it rains a lot, the mountainside will come down into the valleys where people build their homes and towns as a deadly landslide.
Again, this will have a larger impact on flooding than a slight increase in annual precipitation. It’s also something that can be fixed.
It is also important to note that Jakarta is particularly prone to flooding because it is in a river delta, already below sea level, and has been experiencing severe land subsidence from groundwater removal that has been excessive due to an explosion in illegal wells.
Al Jazeera tried to cram a climate narrative into a story about poor infrastructure, poor land use planning, and government mismanagement of infrastructure funding, but the narrative doesn’t work.
The story provides no evidence that climate change is responsible for this year’s flooding because there is none.
Indonesia’s rainfall history is similar to what it has been for centuries, with little relative change in recent decades as the planet has slightly warmed.
Top photo shows flooding in Jakarta by Iqro Rinaldi on Unsplash
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