Indonesian Reliwati Siregar gestured angrily at deforestation around her home on the island of Sumatra, where landslides and floods brought by a tropical storm killed more than 700 people in its deadliest disaster since a cataclysmic tsunami in 2004.
“Mischievous hands cut down trees ... they don’t care about the forests, and now we’re paying the price,” Siregar said at a temporary shelter near her home in Tapanuli, the worst-hit area, with about a quarter of the death toll, government data shows.
The landslides buried homes and crippled rescue and relief efforts, while floodwaters washed ashore dozens of logs, Siregar said.
“The rain did cause the flood, but it’s impossible for it to sweep away this much wood,” the 62-year-old added, her voice rising in disgust. “Those raindrops do not cause wood to fall.”
Environmental experts and regional leaders said the tropical storm in the Malacca Strait that hit Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand last week, killing more than 800 people, was just one of many worsened by climate change.
But deforestation in Sumatra led to a disproportionately deadly toll, they said.
“Yes, there were cyclonic factors, but if our forests were well-preserved ... it would not have been this terrible,” Gus Irawan Pasaribu, a local government leader in Tapanuli, told Reuters.
Pasaribu said he had already protested to the forestry ministry over licences issued for the use of forest area for projects, but it ignored his pleas.
Media said the attorney general’s office is leading a task force to check if illegal activities contributed to the disaster, and that the environment ministry would query eight companies in industries such as logging, mining and palm plantations, after logs washed ashore in some areas of Sumatra.
They did not identify the companies or projects.
Masinton Pasaribu, another local government official in Tapanuli, blamed the clearing of natural forests to make way for palm plantations, which yield palm oil, one of Indonesia’s main exports.
Authorities in the archipelago, home to many dense tropical forests, have looked to reverse some of the destruction but lean heavily on its vast natural resources to fuel economic growth.
Monitoring group Global Forest Watch says North Sumatra lost 1.6 million hectares of tree cover over the period from 2001 to 2024, or the equivalent of 28pc of the tree-covered area.
From 2001 to 2024, Sumatra as a whole has lost 11m acres of forest, an area bigger than Switzerland, said David Gaveau, founder of deforestation monitor Nusantara Atlas.
“This is the island of Indonesia that has had the most deforestation,” he said, adding that global warming was the biggest factor in the floods, though deforestation had a secondary role.
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