Jakarta, hitclubapk3 Indonesia
—
Minister of the Environment (LH)
Hanif Faisol Nurofiq
said he would see directly the level of damage to the Batang Toru area in South Tapanuli Regency, North Sumatra (North Sumatra).
The environmental damage to the ecosystem has become a concern following the flash floods and landslides that occurred in the area at the end of November 2025.Apart from North Sumatra, similar disasters also occurred in two other provinces on the island of Sumatra at the same time, namely in West Sumatra (Sumbar) and Aceh.
According to Hanif, regarding the Batang Toru ecosystem, someone must be responsible for environmental damage there.
ADVERTISEMENT
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
“God willing, tomorrow Thursday (4/12) I will go straight to the field to see what the damage looks like in Batang Toru. Someone must be responsible for this damage,” said Hanif when speaking at the Launch of the Technology Innovation Fund and Study of Climate Resilient Solutions at the Bappenas Building, Jakarta, Tuesday (2/12).
He said that especially in the Batang Toru Watershed (DAS), with an area of 340 thousand hectares, it has quite an interesting landscape character in the shape of the letter V.
Areas such as North Tapanuli, Central Tapanuli and South Tapanuli are in the middle of the V-shaped watershed.
“We can imagine what would happen if there were no more forests on the slopes that support life in Batang Toru. And this is what happened,” said Hanif.
He said that the upstream part of the Batang Toru watershed has now become an area for dry and wet plant cultivation, which should be a forest there.Meanwhile, only 38 percent of the forest capacity in the watershed remains downstream, so it will not have much of an impact when the rain falls at 300 millimeters (mm) on 24-25 October 2025.
He further said that this was exacerbated by land clearing activities for hydroelectric power generation activities, industrial forest plantations, as well as oil palm plantations, which then brought down quite large logs of wood.
As is known, there have been hydrometeorological disasters in the form of flash floods and landslides in North Sumatra (North Sumatra), West Sumatra (Sumbar) and Aceh.
Based on data from the Ministry of Environment, rainfall in North Sumatra reaches 300-400 millimeters (mm) per day.”This means that for every 1 square meter (m2) there was 0.3-0.4 cubic mm of rainwater falling on the day before the disaster, which means it was in the extreme category,” said Hanif.
Meanwhile, Sibolga has a watershed that is not very wide, he said, it is also a disaster-prone area.Rainfall in the area was more than 300 mm on the same day, causing landslides and causing dozens of deaths.
Meanwhile for Aceh, according to Hanif, the rainfall reached 303 mm on 24-25 October, which is greater than for North Sumatra, but because the landscape is wide, the impact of the damage was not too heavy.It still causes huge casualties.
With a landscape of 3.3 million hectares, he said that day 9.7 billion cubic meters of water fell into Aceh, causing the province to collapse.
As for West Sumatra, he continued, with a shorter landscape than Aceh, the loss of life due to hydrometeorological disasters was quite large.Rainfall at that time was more than 300 mm, even close to 400 mm.
“We are still busy taking mitigation steps, while before our eyes, we have to adapt to hydrometeorological disasters very seriously,” he said.
Forest restoration
According to him, it will take around 5-10 years to restore forest capacity.Therefore, through the Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF), which is a funding mechanism to support the implementation of low carbon development at the provincial level, it is hoped that it can play a role in preparing climate adaptation schemes when facing hydrometeorological disasters.
“Today and onwards, according to the forecast of the BMKG (Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency), relatively high rainfall will continue to arrive. Let us immediately formulate adaptation steps that (make us) no longer sacrifice the needy, helpless people in our country, because of our collective negligence,” said Hanif.
(between/kid)