Designed to Fail? How an Outdated Planning Amplified the Impacts of Extreme Weather

Climate change is altering Indonesia’s weather realities. Extreme rainfall, long droughts, and stronger cyclones are no longer rare events and have become part of the new normal. The floods that swept across Sumatra at the end of 2025 caused severe losses: 1,204 people died, 140 remain missing, and 111,800 residents were displaced. The disaster recalled Cyclone Seroja in 2021, when authorities struggled to respond to the scale of the disaster, resulting in 180 deaths and nearly 85,000 had to evacuate.

Yet, the recent Sumatra floods exposed major gaps between climate information and disaster preparedness. Early warning alerts — issued as much as six months in advance — failed to translate into the level of preparedness and urgency needed to protect communities. This highlights the need for Indonesia to shift its approach from simply responding to disasters toward managing climate risks before disasters occur.

A critical tool to do this is spatial planning, which guides how land is allocated and managed for housing, infrastructure, economic activities, and environmental protection. Effective spatial planning helps determine where development should occur, where risks should be avoided, and how communities can be protected from future hazards.

While governments have already incorporated disaster mitigation into their spatial plans, current planning practices still rely heavily on records of past disasters rather than forward-looking climate projections. This backward-looking approach assumes that tomorrow’s risks will mirror yesterday’s patterns — an assumption that no longer holds in an era of accelerating climate change.

To address future climate risks, spatial planning must integrate climate projections that anticipate changing and intensifying hazards; otherwise, development decisions could create new vulnerabilities instead of reducing them.

Why Spatial Planning Is Falling Behind Climate Reality
Integrating climate risk into planning is not just a technical improvement, but an important step to ensure governments prepare for future conditions instead of only responding to past disasters. This is especially critical as rapid urbanization, informal settlements, and land conversion continue to increase climate vulnerability. Using long-term climate projections in development planning can help make infrastructure, budgets, and public services more resilient to future climate extremes, particularly in high-risk areas.

However, implementation remains difficult because of institutional and political challenges. A 2017 study found that integrating climate change into Indonesia’s spatial planning system is often complicated by the need for parliamentary approval, which can delay or weaken climate priorities due to political negotiations. Social and information-related barriers also remain. Public awareness and acceptance of climate and disaster risks are still uneven, affecting support for adaptation measures. In addition, limited availability and quality of spatial data continue to constrain evidence-based planning and decision-making.

Climate-Resilient Planning: Progress on Paper, Gaps in Reality
The Indonesian government has started integrating climate change into spatial planning. Through the Ministry of Agrarian Affairs and Spatial Planning (ATR/BPN) Regulation No. 10/2021, spatial plans are required to include disaster mitigation and climate adaptation. This effort was strengthened by Technical Guideline No. 5/Juknis-HK.02.01/VI/2024, which explains how climate data should be used to assess future risks and impacts. It emphasizes that spatial planning should consider not only current conditions, but anticipate future climate risks and changing hazard patterns.

However, implementation remains uneven. Many regional spatial plans still do not fully incorporate climate risk assessments and future climate projections, partly because the guideline is still new and has not yet been fully operationalized by local governments. Aceh and North Sumatra are still revising their Provincial Spatial Plans (RTRWP), while West Sumatra recently enacted its RTRWP 2025–2045 through Regional Regulation No. 2/2025. Yet the document does not explicitly mention climate change. One reason for this is institutional “lock-in,” where existing systems and routines make it difficult to adopt new approaches without strong political support or institutional reform.

Admittedly, some regions have begun integrating climate considerations, but not comprehensively. Bali Province, for example, established its RTRWP 2023–2043 after the ministerial regulation but prior to the issuance of the technical guideline. The document includes policies related to climate impacts, but much of the disaster risk information relies on assessments by the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB).

Here lies a deeper structural limitation. NPB disaster risk assessments are generally designed for five-year periods and do not sufficiently emphasize forward-looking analysis (which can actually be done), making them less suitable for RTRW documents with a 20-year planning horizon. As a result, local governments tend to rely on short-term risk information without fully considering future climate change, population growth, urban expansion, or increasing hazard intensity. This means risk profiles used in long-term spatial plans may already be outdated when adopted.

Planning for a Climate We Have Not Yet Seen
In the end, the framework is already in place to prevent future disasters, but its effectiveness depends on the government’s willingness to integrate climate information and projections into all levels of spatial planning, from national policies to local zoning decisions. Climate risk data should not remain confined to technical reports, but must directly shape where cities expand, where infrastructure is built, and where settlements are permitted. This also requires practical measures such as risk-based zoning, restrictions in high-risk areas, and resilience requirements in development permits.

Climate risks should also shape fiscal and investment decisions, with public budgets, infrastructure projects, and development plans aligned to climate-informed spatial plans through risk screening and scenario analysis, while tools such as disaster risk insurance can encourage safer and more resilient development. This approach is already being applied in several global cities. For example, Rotterdam uses flood risk projections for current conditions, 2050, and 2100, to guide port planning and prioritize adaptation actions, demonstrating that integrating climate projections into spatial planning is both feasible and practical.

Without this shift, spatial planning risks becoming backward-looking, locking communities into avoidable risks. In a more uncertain climate, planning must anticipate future conditions, not just regulate the present.