What are the Essentials for Community Resilience against Recurring Floods?

Heavy rain intensity merged with urban development issues, including urbanization, land subsidence, and water recharge land conversion, causes the widening of flooded areas across Jakarta, Bekasi, Tangerang, and Depok. This has led to the need for communities at risk to develop their institutional and non-institutional capacity to cope with the flood impacts during the rainy season each year. Researchers have been working on finding solutions to flood problems, but despite some improvements, they have not been able to keep up with the worsening pace of flood events. In the past several years, communities prone to floods have had to accept, adapt, and live with flood, showcasing the increasing need for resilience building in addition to having adequate risk management in place. Resilience-building is essential in the face of climate disasters, and it requires constant adapting and transforming to changes. The concept of resilience has been promoted by researchers, and it refers to the condition of being able to resist and bounce back faster after a disaster event. However, the term "resilience" is not well pronounced at community levels, and there is a need to identify community aspects contributing to resilience, especially at the smallest community level. The gap between the visioning of resilience and its implementation in the community level lies in translating formal visions and documents into practiced actions and activities at the smallest level. Floods in Jakarta are of both fluvial and coastal origin and are worsening due to many drivers, including physical and socio-economic, and due to climate change impacts. Physical drivers include land subsidence, drainage, and storage capacity in Jakarta's rivers and canals due to being clogged by waste and sediments eroded from upstream and climate change. Socio-economic drivers include a rapidly growing population and land-use change, causing economic assets to grow in potentially flood-prone areas. A flood-risk management-based approach has been adopted in Jakarta, which addresses exposure and vulnerability in combination with traditional hazard-reducing measures. Recent examples include the Garuda Project as part of the National Capital Integrated Coastal Development project and the Jakarta Spatial Plan 2030 that discusses the integration of flood control and zoning with spatial planning measures. However, local actors recognize that these measures are not sufficient to tackle the growing flood threat. Flood resilience is the ability to adapt to flood events and recover from them afterwards. Resilience makes possible an adaptive state of risk absorption rather than the more traditional approach of hazard reduction. The ability to adapt to flood events and recover from them afterwards is essential for communities to build their resilience and reduce their vulnerability to flood risks. The study aims to validate and contrast the key contributing factors to community resilience identified in literature with the findings from selected flood-threatened villages (Urban Community/Kelurahan) in Jakarta. The objectives of this study are to identify the literature on what community resilience factors in the case of urban floods are and to conduct a village-level survey that accommodates understanding and compares the identified resilience factors for floods in Jakarta, Indonesia. The study found that prominent factors for resilience within the community in the case study locations are leadership, activism, and volunteerism through periodic capacity building and community engagement activities across all sectors. Moreover, there is a need for mutual acknowledgment between community grassroots organizations and government authorities to enhance and accelerate resilience building. The study also highlights the importance of community resilience in the face of flood risks and the need for communities to develop their institutional and non-institutional capacity to cope with the flood impacts during the rainy season each year.