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 now control tens of millions of hectares of plantations across Indonesia, making the sector one of the country’s most dominant land-use industries. Mining companies have similarly expanded deep into forest regions.

Research by civil society organizations highlights a troubling overlap between political power and corporate interests. In some cases, companies operating in deforested areas have been linked to members of parliament, regional political elites, or family-controlled business networks with privileged access to concessions and permits. Investigations have also raised allegations involving beneficial ownership structures connected to politically exposed individuals.

One example cited by advocacy groups involves a company in Sumatra allegedly linked to a senior regional political figure with past involvement in national politics. In Aceh, campaigners report that a company linked to the current Indonesian president controls extensive land areas where communities have long resisted forest conversion and land dispossession.

On paper, consultation mechanisms exist, but communities often describe them as inaccessible, symbolic, or deliberately opaque. Project information is frequently not shared early enough for meaningful participation. Public consultations are poorly publicized, difficult to access, or dominated by non-representative participants. Environmental impact assessments are often difficult or impossible for affected communities to obtain.

In many cases, residents report learning about projects only after machinery arrives or forest clearing begins. Civil society groups describe this as “pseudo-participation” – consultation processes that technically satisfy legal requirements while excluding the people most affected by environmental destruction.

Evidence suggests that these processes often reduce public participation to a procedural formality through selective disclosure, inaccessible technical language, and the exclusion of Indigenous groups, fishers, and smallholder farmers.

The government’s response to the floods has also faced widespread criticism. Despite the scale of destruction, President Prabowo Subianto did not declare a national disaster status – a decision that critics say constrained emergency coordination and delayed the mobilization of aid.

Civil society organizations report that many affected communities received little or no assistance, while some residents died waiting for relief. The absence of a national emergency declaration became symbolic of what many viewed as broader state inaction, both after the disaster and throughout the years of environmental degradation that made the flooding so severe.

Public messaging from authorities was also criticized for downplaying the scale of the crisis, widening the gap between official narratives and the realities experienced by survivors.

Today, the consequences continue to unfold. Public anger is rising as communities confront both environmental devastation and what many see as systemic impunity.

Protests across Indonesia have been met with arrests, violence, and increasing restrictions on civic space and information access. Civil society organizations warn of growing repression against environmental defenders and critics of government policy.

More than a natural disaster, the floods in Sumatra were the outcome of years of political choices about forests, regulation, accountability, and power. For communities in the affected areas of the island, the crisis is about rivers that can no longer contain rainfall and forests that no longer stand. But it is also about institutions that no longer protect the public interest.