Climate change and anthropogenic pressure on Bintan Islands, Indonesia: An assessment of the policies proposed by local authorities

Abstract

Bintan island is one of Indonesia’s national priority regencies of climate resilience for the marine and coastal sectors. This area also has had the highest frequency of disaster events within the province over the past ten years, where climate-related hazard was dominant. Therefore, it is necessary to receive public support for climate policies within the region. From this point of view, this paper aims to explore the local evidence of climate change, anthropogenic pressure which worsens climate hazards, and the linkage with local policies. The primary data source was a climate data set of observations from 1976–2021, land use change information from 1990–2020, historical climate-related hazards, and related current policy documents. We found that the region’s air temperature has continuously increased over 45 years with the positive standardized precipitation index (SPI) being dominant. Meanwhile the wind speed was tended to decrease since 2015 with the highest extreme record occurred in February 2021. Moreover, climate-related threats occurred more than 70 times in Bintan from 2011 to 2021 where forest fire and flood were tended to worsen. Another anthropogenic source, such as land use change, also puts significant pressure on the part where the open land has increased by 187%, and vegetation area has decreased by 51.1%. This condition creates these small islands vulnerable to climate change, especially climate-related hazards. However, in the regional development plan document 2021–2026, climate change adaptation is not one of the local priority issues, but their concern about disaster mitigation is quite severe. The local authorities work on hard and soft infrastructure to implement disaster risk reduction but less for ecosystem-based solution. However, promoting adaptation efforts in the local policy document is still necessary for sustainable development at the local level.