Ubed Soft

Population growth in large cities always increases in the few last decade. This has consequences for increasing demand of food, cloth, and house. As a result, the fulfillment of residence increases significantly in which it requires opening the land for settlement. Indonesia is a developing country where mining and industry greatly contribute to economic progress. However, these activities negatively affect abiotic, biotic, and culture environment so that environmental degradation in the country can’t be avoided such as erosion, landslide, flood, and tidal inundation.

Indonesia is one of susceptible countries toward disaster in the World. It is caused that Indonesia is located in three tectonic plates namely Indo-Australian Plate, Eurasian Plate, and Pasific Plate. In addition, ring of fire is also located in Indonesia so that natural phenomena like volcanic eruption, earthquake, tsunami, landslide, and flood often occur in this country. National Bereau of Disaster Management in Indonesia (BNPB) revealed that the data of disaster occurences in 2012 are lower than before, however, victim rate is greater. It indicates that disaster risk in Indonesia is still high, so that it needs mitigation to reduce risk rate.

Disaster-triggering factors generally are natural phenomena like subduction between two tectonic plates, however, human intervention also contributes to disaster occurences, for example: deforestation, land-use change, mining activity, transportation and industry. It shows that public awarenes is still low in managing land resources. Therefore, the activity must be decreased as soon as possible to implement sustainable development.

Disaster Mitigation

In disaster mitigation, it needs identification, analysis, and management. This effort is important in order to reduce victim rate and to plan land use. Thus, their expectations are that the lives and property victims can be reduced as small as possible.

To mitigate natural disaster, there are some stages which can be done. The stages is described as follow: (i) Prevention, this process can be done by providing the disaster knowledge to society and including disaster material into educational curriculum; (ii) Mitigation, it can give an understanding to society regarding the direction of the land use, so that it will create suitable land use with its capability; (iii) Preparedness, this process provides a warning to society about existence of natural disaster. The form of this process can be Alert I, Alert II, and Warning;

(iv) Emergency, the process is done at the time of natural disaster. The manifestation of this process may provide food,  medicine, and shelter; (v) Rehabilitation, this process is necessary after disasters occurence in order to renovate infrastructure and public facility, such as reforestation and migration; (vi) Reconstruction, rebuilding area which is affected by natural disaster may be the construction of earthquake-resistant houses and landslides-resistant construction; (vii) Development, this process is important in order to improve of the disaster-affected society. The development can be socio-economic, physic, and culture.

Risk Reduction

Disaster risk reduction begins to experience a paradigm change from conventional paradigm to holistic paradigm. In past time society considered that disaster was a fate which was given by God. The judgment is currently considered irrelevant, however, it is still believed by some people. However, scientific and technological progress have changed the judgment. Human has already thought how to face natural disaster and reduce disaster risk?.

The risk-reducing purpose is to decrease victim rate which is caused by natural disaster. Currently, risk reduction has evolved into risk assessment and risk management. Manifestation of risk assessment can be spatial information about the prone areas to natural disasters.

To build the spatial information must collect some informations such as disaster-occurence data, rainfall, geology, soil, land use, and slope. After the data are collected, it must be overlaid to build hazard-index map and risk-index map. Such informations are needed, however, their capacities are still limited to regional scale. Thus, it needs spatial information with large scales which cover more detailed information.