Spatial vulnerability assessment of climate-related disasters in the Rebana Metropolitan Coastal Area, West Java Province

Abstract

Human activities have become the main significant factor of the occurrence of climate change. Because of this phenomenon, the negative impacts of climate change influence human life itself, especially for the people who live in coastal area. One part of the Rebana Metropolitan Area in West Java Province is the coastal area consisting of Indramayu, Subang, and Cirebon regencies, which is closely related to climate-related disasters issues, such as coastal flooding and sea-level rise. To adapt the negative impacts of climate change, the local decision-makers should know the vulnerability to climate-related disasters. Therefore, the vulnerability assessment of climate-related disasters should be conducted. The spatial assessment was applied in this study to give a deeper perspective on the spatial vulnerability index. This study used georeferenced statistical data of three aspects (physical, geological, and socio-economical). These data then were overlaid with the support of the Geographical Information System (GIS) and eventually produced the vulnerability index for each zone. Based on the result, the Rebana Metropolitan Coastal Area has high vulnerability indexes (9 of 16 districts in these three coastal areas are very vulnerable). Two reasons have been identified. First, the intensity of rainfall and sea-level rise index that occurs annually in Indramayu and Subang is very high. Second, at the same time, these regencies have many vital infrastructures that make the massive potential of losses when climate-related disasters happen in the future. For the Cirebon case, the lack of supportive socio-economy situation in the coastal area has become the main factor for its vulnerability index. Based on these findings, the decision-makers could create different approaches to improve the resilience of each area. In Indramayu and Subang cases, their resilience could be strategically improved by strengthening their physical aspects, especially by ensuring the government protects their vital infrastructures. Meanwhile, for the Cirebon case, the government could be more concerned with its population density and income per capita for each district so that more people could avoid the coastal disaster directly and push their livelihood up in the more uncertain environment.