BNPB Develops Coastal Resilience Toolkit to Promote Coastal Resilience


The CRT, whose design commenced in 2022, is a set of procedures packaged in a QGIS-software-based system that will be easily accessible through an app. The CRT has been created to promote sustainable resilience down to the village level. This has been done by studying past approaches and methodologies in Indonesia, and adding features aimed at facilitating sustainable resilience at community level.

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Considering the higher disaster risks in Indonesian coastal areas, the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB), with support from the SIAP SIAGA Program, is developing Coastal Resilience Toolkit (CRT) to promote resilience among coastal area communities. Drawing on experiences from Indonesia, these toolkits are also designed to be used by island countries in the Pacific region.

Wied Winaktoe, the Lead Consultant for the Toolkit development for the SIAP SIAGA Program, described Indonesian coastal areas ’vulnerability to a to a complex range of disaster risks including sudden events such as tsunamis and storm surges and  gradual changes such as sea level rise caused by climate change. Many productive assets are located in coastal areas, making disasters particularly hazardous to the economy. Given the high disaster risks, coastal communities need to improve resilience to be able to coexist with the threat of disaster.

Efforts to build up coastal resilience are sometimes hindered by several factors. According to Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data cited from the Ministry of Communications and Informatics’ (Kemenkominfo) website, in 2021, the extreme poverty rate in coastal villages reached 12.5 per cent, meaning that of the 10.68 million people living in coastal areas of Indonesia, around 1.3 million live in extreme poverty. The poverty rate in coastal villages is signifcantly higher than the national average of 4.19 per cent. ‘I have observed that several coastal villages I visited have the potential for more robust disaster mitigation, economic development, education infrastructures, and so on’, Wied said.

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(Click the above image to access information sheet of CRT in Indonesian Language)

According to Wied, support is needed for most coastal communities to be able to engage in disaster risk reduction (DRR) activities. Therefore, efforts to support coastal area resilience are indispensable in addressing current threats and challenges. It is within this context that BNPB conceived the idea of developing the CRT. ‘These tools are being developed to meet the need for an in-depth understanding of the natural and demographic characteristics of coastal areas to enable data to be analysed for development planning and decision-making purposes’, he explained.

The CRT, whose design commenced in 2022, is a set of procedures packaged in a QGIS-software-based system that will be easily accessible through an app. The CRT has been  created to promote sustainable resilience down to the village level. This has been done by  studying  past approaches and methodologies in Indonesia, and adding features aimed at facilitating sustainable resilience  at community level.

Four phases

The CRT has been developed with a 4-phase approach to promoting sustainable resilience, namely risk assessment, solution identification, resilience governance and its impact on DRR investment, and effective measurement. ‘We hope that this toolkit can be used down to the village level to map risks, offer potential solutions, and from there, develop funding and action plans, and support continuous evaluation to achieve the desired level of resilience’, said Wied.

He added that, of the 4 phases, currently, only the first and second phases are generally being implemented in the field. Even if some reach the third and fourth phases, they do them partially, thus lacking continuity. ‘Thus far, there has not been a platform that combines all these 4 phases into one package’, he said.

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It has taken time for the CRT development to make the 4 phases available in one application, because cross-sectoral analysis is required for each phase.  The toolkit has been designed so that resilience can be measured based on 5 groups of indicators:physical mitigation, economic development, healthcare services, natural resources management, and protection of productive assets. As such the CRT has been developed not only by a team of information technology experts but also with critical input from economic, healthcare, policy, and other experts, from government institutions such as the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, Ministry of Environment, and Ministry of Public Works, non-governmental organisations, and universities.

Wied stated that, in addition to meeting the purpose of promoting greater resilience in Indonesia, the CRT concept is viewed as fit for use by other countries with similar vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is hoped that the tool can be   applied in other countries in the Pacific region. It is hoped that the offer can encourage closer cooperation with Pacific countries in the CRT’s further development, both for joint research and tool development.

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