Flooding and Urban Planning: Challenges and Solutions

Flooding has always been a complex major issue in most regions of Indonesia, especially as a tropical country which causes heavy raining and hydrometeorological disasters to frequently happen in Indonesia. These floods arent just youre typical “oh its flooding i can skip school yay” kind of floods, these floods are the type to actually cause deaths, destroy homes, enough to displace its people. Just so you can see how deadly these floods are, in 2019 Papua was hit with the deadliest landslides and flash floods which caused the death of 113 victims with many victims still missing till this day. In 2020 new years, not only were we greeted by a fresh start to a new year, we were also greeted by floods that displaced 60,000 people and caused 66 fatalities. So you can see, flooding is certainly not a light hearted problem in Indonesia.

But why does it flood so easily in Indonesia? Besides due to the high frequency of hydrometeorological disasters in Indonesia, another issue is due to poor urban planning knowledge. Poor urban planning knowledge primarily causes flooding in highly developed regions in Indonesia such as Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, and etc. Highly developed regions have compromised most of their standardized urban planning for the sake of accommodating the nonstop rising population in prospective regions. Populations for these regions continue to increase due to people from low developed regions thinking that they will be able to increase their quality of life in developed cities, but when everyone another effethinks the same thought this will cause a region to get overpopulated which means double garbage that block drainages as well as double amount of buildings needed to accommodate people.

It is clear that if we want to take a step into solving Indonesia’s flooding problem, we need to start by fixing its damaged urban planning. But how do we touch all of these issues with one fix? It is clear that the main factor affecting urban planning in this scenario is its poor urban planning. To tackle this issue we can start by fixing the terrible drainage system by creating a sustainable drainage system. Instead of usual drainage systems that use pipes and all, a sustainable drainage system is designed to mimic natural water absorption that leads to becoming ground water resulting in maximized water absorption decreasing the possibility of floods. To maximize the usage of a sustainable drainage system however, buildings in the city must also implant green roofs by planting multiple plants on their buildings roof. Not only does this improve air quality, this helps control the quantity and quality of water that gets absorbed into the sustainable drainage system. With the combination of green roofs and sustainable drainage system they will be able to take on even the heaviest of rains, minimizing the possibility of a flood.

And lastly another aspect we can add into our urban planning is the creation of sponge cities. Sponge cities are urban areas designed to absorb, reuse, and store rain water effectively. If we are able to at least build 3 sponge cities in our urban planning, not only will we be able to decrease flooding. We will also gain beautiful green sceneries that can solve pollutants in huge cities as well as discovering a new water source for daily needs.

But obviously to take our first step into these strategies to mitigate flooding, we need the knowledge to implement these strategies. Without knowledge there is no way for us to build all of these strategies mentioned before. So before we take a step into our green future free of flooding, it is important for us to educate ourselves.