Flooding and Land Use Change in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia

Abstract

Flooding is a routine occurrence throughout much of the monsoonal tropics. Despite well-developed repertoires of response, agrarian societies have been 'double exposed' to intensifying climate change and agro-industrialization over the past several decades, often in ways that alter both the regularity of flood events and individual and community capacity for response. This paper engages these tensions by exploring everyday experiences of and responses to extreme flood events in a case study village in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, which has also been the site of corporate oil palm development since 2010. We first reconstruct histories of extreme flood events along the Konawe'eha River using oral histories and satellite imagery, describing the role of these events in straining the terms of daily production and reproduction. We then outline the ways smallholder agriculturalists are responding to flood events through alterations in their land use strategies, including through the sale or leasing of flood-prone lands, the relocation of riverine vegetable production to hillside locations, and adoption of new cropping choices and management practices. We highlight the role of such responses as a driver of ongoing land use change, potentially in ways that increase systemic vulnerability to floods moving forward.

Flooding and land use change in Jambi Province, Sumatra: integrating local knowledge and scientific inquiry

“…Government reports from Jambi Province provide some additional support to these measurements as they discuss flooding as an increasing environmental problem across Jambi Province and beyond the Tembesi watershed (Minister of Public Works 2012, Batanghari Watershed Office 2016, Jambi Provincial Government 2016). They are also in line with other studies across Indonesia, where local people associated increases in flood frequency and intensity with land use change from forests to oil palm plantations and other types of land use (Obidzinski et al 2012, Larsen et al 2014, Wells et al 2016, Kelley and Prabowo 2019. Our findings further correspond with studies showing increases in streamflow (Adnan and Atkinson 2011) and in the number of days flooded (Tan-Soo et al 2016), which is associated with land use conversion to rubber and oil palm plantations.…”

“…The interviewed villagers further reported that following land use conversion, flood events have become difficult to predict because water levels today rise faster after rainfall events and the occurrence of flooding has partly shifted in seasonality. A decreasing predictability of flood events following land conversion has also been a common observation by villagers in different areas across Indonesia (Leimona et al 2015, Kelley andPrabowo 2019). Our water level data, however, showed no substantial evidence supporting these observations by local villagers.…”

“…This integration may further contribute to an understanding of how changing flooding regimes may trigger people's response and feedback processes that shape water flows in turn (Lele 2009, Di Baldassare et al 2014. For instance, Kelley and Prabowo (2019) use oral histories to reveal social transformation processes set in motion by changing flooding regimes. These transformation processes were shown to increase the people's systemic vulnerability to flooding as well as producing feedbacks of altering river flows.…”

“…Our interview data as well as observations in the field show that most of the studied wetland areas were managed by or with the support of private companies, external investors, or more welloff farmers. Likewise, Schoneveld et al (2019) and Kelley and Prabowo (2019) show that plantation development on peat soils and flood prone riverbanks in Indonesia was mainly realized by more well-off farmers, political elites, and private companies that adopted more industrialized land use operations. This concentration of companies and local elites in wetland areas, together with the already mentioned conflicts over water infrastructure, creates a risk of an increasingly unequal distribution of flood damage.…”

“…For example, Tan-Soo et al (2016) and Wells et al (2016) found rubber and oil palm plantations to be spatially associated with reports of increasing flooding occurrence in Malaysia and Indonesia. Finally, a number of studies conducting qualitative social research present interview data from villagers across Indonesia who associated land use change, toward monoculture plantations, with increasing flood occurrence (Obidzinski et al 2012, Larsen et al 2014, Kelley and Prabowo 2019.…”