The Indian Ocean disaster is a climate tragedy — and needs more attention

In late November, three tropical cyclones — Senyar, Ditwah and Koto — devastated cities and villages in countries around the Indian Ocean. In Indonesia’s Sumatra, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, torrential rains, high winds, landslides and flash floods killed at least 1,000 people, buried homes beneath metres of mud and destroyed roads and bridges.

The storms’ destructive scale is close to that of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, as Muzakir Manaf, the governor of Aceh, Indonesia, said in a statement. However, the world has mostly overlooked this emergency. Millions of people have been displaced, and many are sick or starving, yet aid has been slow to arrive. Few people have recognized the cyclones’ unusual nature and what they herald for the world’s future.

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The rainfall was so intense that it created ‘a rough sea on the land’, as my friend in the Sumatran city of Langsa told me before we lost contact. One week of non-stop deluges induced a powerful tsunami-like river current that washed away concrete bridges, dragged giant timber trees from encroached forests and inundated people in their homes.

But with these horrifying scenes also comes frustration. Some countries, such as Sri Lanka, have declared a national emergency and asked for international help. Others, including Indonesia, have not even acknowledged that this is a crisis. Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto held his first cabinet meeting about the disaster on 27 November, ten days after the first heavy rains and landslides in North Sumatra. As this article went to press, the government has still not declared a national emergency.

I’m baffled by the slow response. Many villages and cities in West Sumatra, North Sumatra and Aceh are disconnected from the rest of the world. Food is scarce and prices are soaring; hospitals have collapsed. Local governments have sent some aid, but damaged infrastructure has hampered the process.

Indonesia not declaring this to be a national emergency means international aid is slow in coming. The issue is exacerbated by the silence of much of the international community. Some world leaders have expressed condolences and the United Nations has offered help. But no word has yet come from the European Union or United States.

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Perhaps one reason for the delays is the sparse coverage of the crisis in the global media, which has failed to portray the vast scale of this catastrophe. Initially, news outlets reported a series of floods on a country-by-country basis, ignoring the connection between them. The disaster is now being reported as ‘southeast Asia floods’, a shift that is welcome, but that still misses the root of the problem.

The Indian Ocean region is especially vulnerable to extreme weather, owing to a combination of climate change and severe environmental degradation, including from deforestation and mining. The fact that most international climate activists are also failing to call the situation out as a climate tragedy is another troubling omission.