Revealing Cost and Benefit of Vegetative Approach to Mitigate Riverbank Landslide in Semarang Coastal Villages

Abstract

Landslide mitigation efforts through a vegetative approach have not been entrenched in the community, including in Semarang Coastal Villages. This condition happened due to several things, such as the lack of public understanding about the importance of reforesting river borders, the lack of understanding of reforestation, and the unclear benefits the community of river reforestation will receive. Although no specific approach can prevent landslides, the vegetative approach is one of the prevention strategies that tend to be easy to do and has a low cost. Therefore, the vegetative approach is a feasible strategy to be proposed, where the current government is also encouraging the application of this approach to prevent landslides as well as community empowerment. This study aims to identify the costs and benefits of implementing a vegetative approach to prevent landslides in the coastal area of Semarang City, knowing the socio-economic benefits the community may receive from the vegetative approach. It is hoped that it can increase community participation, especially among the local coastal people in Semarang City, which belong to the middle to lower economic community. The analytical method used is the cost-benefit analysis method by comparing the number of benefits and costs studied from the implementation process of the vegetative approach from beginning to maintenance. The data used in this study is secondary data such as existing land use, river border area, plant species, and population. The expected result is the feasibility of applying a vegetative approach in riverbank areas that compares the number of social and economic benefits and socio-economic costs. By knowing the feasibility, it can also be determined how the socio-economic capacity of the community to implement the approach.