Widespread damage has hit farms across Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island with those in parts of Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay particularly hard hit and forestry slash is once again a huge problem.

Tolaga Bay farmer Bridget Parker told how forestry slash has caused a huge amount of damage to her farm yet again as the death toll from Cyclone Gabrielle rose to six.

“It’s enormous — there is silt all over the road. It’s so thick you can’t walk through it; there are logs as far as the eye can see,” she said.

• READ MORE: Cyclone Gabrielle: NZ death toll rises, ‘grave concerns’ for several missing
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“There are so many logs all the fences are down; wherever you look it’s total carnage.”

Parker, whose farm has been destroyed by forestry slash during storms multiple times, said they can look at forecasts for rain, wind, drought and even tides but they could not predict what was going to happen when it came to the logs.

“We don’t farm logs. Their logs [the forestry companies] and their friggin’ silt needs to stay inside their friggin’ estate gates.

“It does not have the right to be spewed over the 3000ha of beautiful land that is farmed on the flats below it.”

Parker said Minister for Forestry Stuart Nash needed to visit the region within the next week to answer to farmers.

“There’s floodwaters everywhere, in our house, in our sheds. It’s far higher than last time and we are really really struggling to cope; we’re really angry.”

Hawke’s Bay area ‘smashed’
Forestry slash has also caused issues on farms in Hawke’s Bay where there was widespread flooding and slips.

Suz Bremner, who runs sheep, beef and friesian bulls along the Taihape Napier Road, said she had never seen damage like it.

“I tipped out the rain gauge this morning. It was overflowing at 170mm so we don’t know how much we’ve had.

“The power is out but from what we are hearing from people nearby is that the wider Hawke’s Bay area has just been smashed.”

Bremner said she went for a drive around her farm yesterday morning to assess the damage but roads were blocked by trees while tracks had been washed away.

“Looking at some of our neighbours who have big cliff faces on their properties the slip damage is horrendous.

“We have a road through the top end of our farm and we turned down there this morning and my husband and I could not believe our eyes. The slash that had washed down through the creeks is unreal; I’ve never seen that before.

“I think the forestry has come down and created a dam and then during the night it’s just exploded and now there’s slash everywhere,” she said.

Other farmers RNZ spoke to in Hawke’s Bay said they were hunkering down waiting for the worst of the weather to pass before getting out to assess the level of damage.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

ANALYSIS: By David Robie in Semarang, Indonesia

A vast coastal area of the Indonesian city of Semarang, billed nine months ago by a national newspaper as “on the brink of ecological disaster”, is fighting back with a valiant survival strategy.

Thanks to a Dutch mangrove restoration programme and flexible bamboo-and-timber “eco” seawalls, some 70,000 people at risk in the city of nearly two million have some slim hope for the future.

An area that was mostly rice fields and villages on the edge of the old city barely two decades ago has now become “aquatic” zones as flooding high tides encroach on homes.

Onetime farmers have been forced to become fishermen.

Villagers living in Bedono, Sriwulan, Surodadi and Timbulsloko in Demak regency and urban communities in low-lying parts of the city are most at risk.

Residents have been forced to raise their houses or build protective seawalls or be forced to abandon their homes when their floors become awash.

Environmental changes in Semarang have been blamed by scientists on anthropogenic and “natural” factors such as tidal and river flooding – known locally as rob, mangroves destruction since the 1990s, fast urban growth and extensive groundwater extraction.

Climate change
This has been compounded by climate change with frequent and extreme storms.

It has been a pattern familiar in many other low-lying coastal areas in Indonesia, such as the capital Jakarta and second-largest city Surabaya.

In February, The Jakarta Post reported that both Jakarta and Semarang faced environmental crises.

Citing Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI) researcher Henny Warsilah, a graduate of Paris I-Sorbonne University in France, who measured the resilience of three coastal cities – Jakarta, Semarang and Surabaya – the Post noted only Surabaya had built sufficient environmental and social resilience to face natural disasters.

Jakarta and Semarang, Warsilah said, “were not doing very well”. Although Surabaya was faring much better with its urban policies.

The fate of some five million people living in Indonesia’s at risk coastal areas – including Semarang — was also profiled in the Indonesian edition of National Geographic magazine last month under the banner headline “Takdir Sang Pesisis” – “The destiny of the coast”.

The introduction asked: “”The disappearance of the mangrove belt now haunts seaside residents. How can they respond to a disaster that is imminent?”

Ongoing reclamation
According to The Jakarta Post, Semarang “has ongoing reclamation projects in the northern part of the city, which threaten to submerge entire neighbourhoods in the next 20 years”.

“The more [the city] is expanded, the more land will subside because the region is a former volcanic eruption zone, and it is a swamp area,” says Warsilah.

“With the progression of the reclamation projects, the land is not strong enough to withstand the pressure.”

With a team of international geologists and researchers attached to Semarang’s Center for Disaster Mitigation and Coastal Rehabilitation Studies (CoREM) at Diponegoro University, I had the opportunity to visit Timbulsloko village earlier this month to see the growing “crisis” first hand.

City planners might see the only option as the residents being forced to leave for higher ground, but there appear to be no plans in place for this. In any case, local people defiantly say they want to stay and will adapt to the sinking conditions.

One woman, a local shopkeeper, who has a three-generations household in the village with water encroaching into her home at most high tides, says she won’t leave with a broad smile.

I talked to her through an interpreter (CESASS director Dr Herman Indah Wahyuni) as she sat with her mother and youngest daughter on a roadside bamboo shelter.

“I have lived here for a long time, and I am very happy with the situation. My husband has his work here as a fisherman,” she said.

A local storekeeper with her mother and youngest daughter – three generations live in her Timbulsloko village home. Video: David Robie’s Café Pacific.

‘We don’t want to leave’
“We live with the flooding and we don’t want to leave.”

She also said there was no clear viable alternative for the people of the village – there was no plan by the local authorities for relocation.

Later, she showed me inside her house and how far the water flooded across the floors. Electrical items, such as a television, had to be placed on raised furniture. The children slept on high beds, and the adults clambered onto cupboards to get some rest.

The village has a school, community centre, a mosque and a church – most of these with a sufficiently high foundation to be above the seawater.

However, the salination means that crops and vegetables cannot grow.

The community cemetery is also awash at high tide and there have been reports of eroded graves and sometimes floating bodies to the distress of families.

Timbulsloko’s village cemetery. Video: David Robie’s Café Pacific

We were warned “don’t touch anything with your hands” as the flooding also causes a health hazard.

Research projects
The situation has attracted a number of research projects in an effort to find solutions to some of the problems, the latest being part of the 2017 World Class Professor (WCP) programme funded by the Indonesian government.

Two of the six professors on the University of Gadjah Mada’s WCP programme, in partnership with Diponegoro University, are working with local researchers at CoREM.

They are geologists Dr Magaly Koch, from the Centre for Remote Sensing at Boston University, US, and Dr David Menier, associate professor HDR at Université de Bretage-Sud, France, who are partnered with Dr Muhammad Helmi, also a geologist and director of CoREM, and Dr Manoj Mathew. Both Dr Mathew and Dr Menier are of LGO Laboratoire Géosciences Océan.

“At the regional scale, the rate of subsidence is related to the geological and geomorphological context. North Java is a coastal plain that is very flat, silty to muddy, influenced by offshore controlling factors (e.g., wave, longshore drifts, tidal currents etc.) and monsoons, and surrounded by volcanoes,” explains Dr Menier.

“Locally, anthropogenic factors can play a serious role as well.”

He says that coastal plains are dynamic. However, human activities are fixed – “the first contradiction”.

“Humans want to control and continue their livelihood, and are reluctant to accept changes related to their own activities or natural factors.”

Dr Menier says the subsidence is due to many factors, but some key issues have never been studied.

On a long term scale, the active faults of the area need to be examined in a geodynamic context and also volcanic activity with Mt Urganan and Mt Muria/Medak.

“We need to have a better understanding of the age of the coastal plain in order to reconstruct the past, explain the present-day and predict the future,” he says.

“Colonisation in the 17th century-Dutch period probably led to destruction of ecosystems (mangrove) and fine sediment usually trapped by plants has been stopped.”

Dr Koch adds: “Subsidence rates and their spatial distribution along the coastal plain need to be studied in detail using InSAR techniques. Groundwater abstraction (using deep wells) is probably happening in the city of Semarang but not necessarily in Demak.”

Mangrove restoration
Mangrove restoration and mitigation has been used successfully to restore coastal resilience and ecosystems in Timbulsloko.

While noting that “high failure rates are typical” due to wrong special being planted and other factors, Dr Dolfi Debrot, of a Dutch project consortium, argues “given the right conditions, mangrove recovery actually works best without planting at all.”

The consortium involves Witteveen+Bos, Deltares, EcoShape, Wetlands International, Wageningen University and IMARES.

However, community planting is also a strategy deployed in the lowland villages.

Mangroves revitalise aquaculture ponds for crab and shrimp farming.

A “growing land” technique borrowed from the muddy Wadden Sea in the Netherlands has also been used successfully at Timbulsloko and other villages.

Semi-permeable dams are built from bamboo or wooden poles packed with branches to “dampen wave action”. In time, a build up of sediment settles and allows mangroves to grow naturally.

“These eco-engineering seawalls are better than the concrete fixed barriers,” says Dr Helmi. “The permanent seawalls in turn become eroded at their base and eventually fall over.”

Dr David Robie is on the WCP programme with Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta.

• More on the Indonesian WCP project

Farmers from several villages in Central Java province’s Rembang district, who started their protest last week by having their feet encased in concrete, were joined by environmentalists on March 20. The church also offered a message of support.

“This protest symbolises our life which will be shackled by the factory,” said Joko Prianto, coordinator of the protest.

He said the factory would ruin the quality of groundwater in the Kendeng karst mountain range.

“The groundwater basin must be protected. If not, we will face drought during the dry season and floods during the rainy season,” he said.

The construction of the PT Semen Indonesia factory began in 2014 but protesters have doggedly delayed it. It was due to begin operating in April but the launch has been delayed, according to local news reports.

Responding to the farmers’ protest, PT Semen Indonesia Corporate Secretary Agung Wiharto said the company had offered a number of solutions, including employing a so-called block mining system to prevent water pollution.

Support for farmers
Father Aloysius Budi Purnomo, chairman of the Commission for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of Semarang Archdiocese, supported the farmers.

“They fight because they see nature being damaged due to the exploitation of natural resources. This is exactly what Pope Francis spoke about in his encyclical Laudato si,” he said.

“The papal encyclical encourages the church to support those fighting for the integrity of creation,” he added.

Similar support came from Muhammad Nurkhoiron from the National Commission on Human Rights.

“One of our commission’s efforts is to protect the karst mountains’ ecology for the sake of all people. The right to water is part of human rights,” he said.

In April 2016, a similar rally ran for two days until presidential staff promised to schedule a meeting between the protesters and president. In August, they met with the president who said no permit would be issued until an environmental assessment was complete.

Experts involved in the assessment reportedly said that the factory’s activities were feasible. On February 23, Governor Ganjar Pranowo issued a permit but the farmers do not accept the finding.

Australian trade union groups and Philippines solidarity networks have joined in protesting over the Kidapawan massacre in the southern island of Mindanao last Friday, leaving 3 dead, 87 missing and 116 wounded.

According to Interaksyon, security forces opened fire as they dispersed farmers and indigenous lumad tribespeople who were blockading the Cotabato-Davao highway in Kidapawan City.

The number of wounded had climbed to 116, according to Ariel Casilao of Anakpawis, speaking by phone from the United Methodist Church (UMC) compound in Kidapawan. But other reports have indicated a lower number of casualties.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions; Maritime Union of Australia, SEARCH Foundation; Philippines Australia Union Link; Action for Peace and Development in the Philippines, and Migrante Australia are among those who have prostested.

A protest letter has been delivered to the Philippines consulate in Sydney.

“We are outraged at the shooting of a large and peaceful protest of farmers in Kidapawan, Mindanao, last Friday morning, by the Philippines National Police,” Peter Murphy, spokesperson for the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, said today.

“We demand action from the Philippines President today, along with protests around the globe.”

The casualty figures given were smaller than those reported by Interaksyon.

A statement by the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) said he shootings left two people dead, and at least 37 hurt and wounded.

Many were still unaccounted for after the violent dispersal, including women, elderly and six minors.

45 arrested
At least 45 men were illegally arrested and are now under police custody at the Kidapawan Gym, while 27 women (three are pregnant and two senior citizens) were arrested and are now at the Kidapawan City Convention Center.

The rest of the protesters who are in sanctuary at the UMC’s Spottswood Methodist Center  continue to experience harassment, as combined elements of the police and military surround the church compound and restrict the entry and exit of farmers, their supporters, and churchgoers.

The farmers mounted the protest against the government’s attention to the much-needed distribution of relief goods and agricultural assistance amid the impact of the El Niño climate phenomenon.

The government had promised billions of pesos to mitigate the situation. But nothing followed.

The ICHRP called for:

1. Immediate independent investigation of the incident;
2. Pull-out of police and military elements blocking the entry and exit of protesters and support groups in the UMC compound;
3. Release of protesters illegally detained by the PNP;
4. Immediate distribution of the rice support and other calamity assistance to the farmers;
5. Relief and prosecution of police officials involved in the dispersal and shooting of farmers pending an impartial investigation;
6. The accountability of Governor Emmylou Taliño-Mendoza and all involved officials;
7. The Philippine government to adhere to/respect the basic fundamental right of its citizens to freedom of association and assembly, and to come to its defence and aid when disasters have deprived them of their basic needs.

• Demand for rice turns bloody
• North Cotabato governor slammed for threatening bishop