December 9, 2025 | 10:00 am
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Floods and landslides across the island of Sumatra in late November 2025 ignited a debate over the disaster’s official status. Many groups pressed President Prabowo Subianto’s administration to declare a national disaster, citing the catastrophic deluge that left more than 800 people dead. Yet the government argued the designation was unnecessary because all agencies had already been mobilized to respond.
Djati Mardiatno, a professor of environmental geomorphology at the Faculty of Geography, Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, said disaster status is actually governed in Law No. 24/2007 on Disaster Management. But the law still lacks implementing regulations.
As a result, Djati explained, determining whether a disaster should be elevated to national scale depends heavily on the president’s assessment. “His considerations can be highly political,” said the doctorate graduate of Leopold-Franzens Universität Innsbruck, Austria, when contacted by Tempo on Wednesday, December 3, 2025.
The president weighs various inputs before declaring a national disaster emergency status. According to Djati, the head of state should receive recommendations from the National Disaster Mitigation Agency, (BNPB). The agency provides a series of indicators, from the death toll and the geographical extent of the disaster to estimated losses and social or political impacts. In the past 25 years, the government has declared a national disaster only twice, namely the 2004 tsunami and the Covid-19 pandemic.
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