Indonesia disaster agency warns of drought in Java, Bali amid El Nino

JAKARTA - Indonesia is expecting a longer dry season, lasting until October, due to

the El Nino weather pattern,

threatening clean water supply and increasing the risk of forest fires, said the country’s disaster agency on Monday.

Indonesia’s weather agency has pushed back its forecast for the peak of the dry season due to El Nino’s impact on September and October, compared with its previous estimate of August to September, Mr Abdul Muhari, a spokesman for disaster agency BNPB, told an online media briefing.

This has the potential to exacerbate drought in islands below the Equator in the archipelago, which include Java – home to over 150 million people, as well as Bali and Nusa Tenggara.

“It has been two months of dry weather in Java, and it’s worrying because the extreme impact of El Nino will last until October,” said Mr Abdul, warning that water levels at a reservoir near Jakarta have significantly dropped.

This year’s dry season is expected to be the most severe since 2019, partially due to the return of El Nino, the weather agency previously said.

Six people have died in a remote, mountainous region in the country’s eastern Papua region, where thousands are facing hunger brought on by drought, the authorities said in July.

The authorities also warned that some provinces, such as Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra island, experienced frequent forest fires in recent weeks, even though the country’s total number of forest fires in July was lower than in 2019.

The disaster agency recorded 75 fires in July, compared with 115 in the same month in 2019.

The South-east Asian nation experienced devastating forest fires in 2015 and 2019 that blanketed the country and parts of the region with haze. The 2019 fires caused about US$5.2 billion (S$7 billion) of economic losses in the eight Indonesian provinces, according to the World Bank. REUTERS