While Floodwaters Recede, Child Trauma Does Not
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Cyclone Senyar Leaves Hidden Toll for Indonesian Families and Environment
Floodwaters are in the headlines. Mud is in the photographs. Death toll numbers force a nation to pay attention. But for children, the disaster continues long after the rain stops.
Solutions include prioritizing school repairs and reopenings after a natural disaster, and adding school curricula and activities on how to strengthen Indonesia’s islands against future calamities.
Cyclone Senyar Strikes
In late November 2025, relentless downpours and landslides tore through parts of the Indonesian provinces of Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra.
A few days later, researchers in Madain Yogyakarta described how Tropical Cyclone Senyar, only the second documented cyclone to form in the Malacca Strait, helped trigger extreme rainfall—more than 300 millimeters (11.8 inches) in a single day in parts of North Sumatra. The deluge turned rivers into moving walls of water and hillsides into deadly avalanches.
As the weeks passed, official death toll numbers rosewith every new validation. By December 13, Indonesia’s disaster agency reported 1,006 deaths and around 654,000 people displaced across the three provinces.
Yet, the most enduring losses are not always counted in the same breath as collapsed bridges and damaged homes. They show up in a 5-year-old child who panics at the sound of heavy rain, in a teenager who stops going to school because the road is gone, in a baby who goes unwashed for days because there is no clean water, and in families who must decide which need is most urgent when every need is urgent.
When School Disappears
In disasters, children lose more than lessons. They lose predictability—one of the most important building blocks of healthy development. Many cannot explain fear and grief in neat sentences; distress emerges as sleeplessness, clinginess, irritability, and difficulty concentrating.
In disasters, children lose more than lessons. They lose predictability—one of the most important building blocks of healthy development.
There is also a loss of security, which can be mitigated by a return to a routine. When daily structure reemerges, children can trust again that life can be organized and a stable future is still imaginable.
The scale of educational disruption in Sumatra this season is staggering. Indonesia’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education reported in mid-December that 3,274 education units were affected across Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra—impacting 276,249 students and 25,936 teachers and educational personnel. At the same time, 403,534 students across 19,427 class groups experienced disrupted learning because facilities were damaged, access roads were cut, families were displaced, and some schools became temporary shelters.
UNICEF has long emphasized that learning spaces can protect children from harm, connect them to basic services, and provide psychosocial support through stability and structure. This is why “education in emergencies” is not an optional add-on. When classrooms close, children face higher risks of neglect, exploitation, violence, early marriage pressures, and hazardous work—especially when families have lost income and safe housing.
Sadly, this pattern is seen worldwide. UNICEF analysis found 43.1 million internal child displacements linked to weather-related disasters between 2016 and 2021, driven mostly by floods and storms.
On December 5, a UNICEF leader decried the impact of typhoons across Southeast Asia.
“Over the past months and in recent weeks, children across five countries in Southeast Asia—Indonesia, Viet Nam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia—have faced the devastating effects of typhoons, floods and storms,” Ricardo Pires, UNICEF deputy spokesman, said in a statement. “They are waking up in evacuation shelters. They're drinking unsafe water. They're watching their parents struggle to rebuild homes and livelihoods that have been destroyed not once, but repeatedly. And they're missing school not for days, but for weeks.”
Pires then cited UNICEF’s latest data, which showed that since late November, “more than 4.1 million children in the region have had their education disrupted due to devastating climate-related disasters.”
Why Sumatra Keeps Getting Hit
Extreme rain can overwhelm even healthy ecosystems. But the difference between a difficult storm and a deadly cascade often lies upstream.
According to Dr. Hatma Suryatmojo, a hydrological and watershed conservation researcher at Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), two factors were in play with Cyclone Senyar: extreme weather and “weakened natural defenses in the upper watershed.”
He explained that upper-watershed forests should act like a sponge, intercepting rainfall and allowing water to infiltrate soil rather than racing straight into rivers. For instance, canopy interception in intact tropical forests can handle 15% to 35% of rainfall. Then, undisturbed soils can allow up to 55% of rainfall to infiltrate, and 25% to 40% of rain can return to the atmosphere through evapotranspiration.
Upper-watershed forests should act like a sponge, intercepting rainfall and allowing water to infiltrate soil rather than racing straight into rivers.
But when that “safety belt” is damaged or removed, rain becomes runoff, runoff becomes erosion, erosion becomes sediment-choked rivers, and rivers become flash floods.
Sumatra’s vulnerability is not only about geography and monsoon patterns. It is also about land governance, deforestation, and the cumulative weakening of natural defenses. In Aceh, the same UGM report noted that about 59% of the province remained natural forest in 2020; yet, combined data indicated more than 700,000 hectares (1.73 million acres) of forest loss between 1990 and 2020. Conversion to plantations, illegal logging, road expansion, and settlement in flood- and mudslide-prone zones all raise the stakes when the sky opens.
Clearance of peatlands is another factor. These massive wetlands can store impressive amounts of water, but drained or degraded peat can intensify both flood and fire risks. Restoration strategies in Indonesia have emphasized rewetting, revegetation, and livelihood revitalization (the “3Rs”). In other words, in order to have fewer child disasters, it is necessary to do more environmental repair.
Climate change is the force multiplier. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assessed with high confidence that heavier precipitation will become more frequent and intense as warming increases, raising the risk of rain-driven flooding. For Sumatra, that means today’s “rare” extremes could become tomorrow’s recurring emergencies.
Reducing the Harm
Natural disasters sit at the intersection of climate, land use, infrastructure, poverty, and public services. The good news is that solutions also sit at that intersection.
Start upstream by restoring ecosystems that slow water down. Sumatra needs disaster-risk-based spatial planning that treats upper watersheds as protection infrastructure, advises Dr. Suryatmojo at UGM. That means halting deforestation in high-risk catchments, enforcing land-use rules, restoring degraded slopes, and protecting remaining critical ecosystems, such as Leuser in Aceh and Batang Toru in North Sumatra. It also means investing in peatland rewetting and rehabilitation because healthy peat helps regulate water.
Sumatra needs disaster-risk-based spatial planning that treats upper watersheds as protection infrastructure.
Treat schools as life-saving services, not “later-stage recovery.” Governments have already taken steps that matter: emergency classroom tents, school kits, and learning materials have been distributed, alongside efforts to restore sanitation facilities and damaged classrooms. But continuity must be designed, not improvised. Every disaster-prone district should have a ready-to-activate plan for temporary learning spaces, safe routes to school, rapid repairs for water and toilets, and clear referral pathways when children show signs of severe distress.
Support teachers so they can support children. In disaster zones, teachers are often the first to recreate “school” in its simplest form—small groups in shelters, lessons on a village terrace, reading circles in a prayer hall.
But teachers also grieve, relocate, and struggle. When they are overloaded with responsibilities without tools and care, the recovery system children rely on is weakened.
Children as Environmental Guardians
One powerful shift is possible: Children can be reimagined not as helpless victims but as young partners in building environmental resilience.
In practical terms, this can look like:
School-based eco-resilience projects: Student teams can map drainage points, monitor rainfall, document river changes, and report blocked culverts—simple citizen science that strengthens early warning at the neighborhood level.
Nature-based learning: They can assist with mangrove planting where coasts need buffers, re-green schoolyards to reduce runoff, and engage in watershed stewardship activities that connect science to everyday survival.
Preparedness as a routine: Schools can hold child-friendly evacuation drills, “safe school” checklists, and family communication plans to help children prepare for storms.
Environmental values as identity: Young people can be taught how to view protection of forests, rivers, and peatlands as part of their pride in their culture. Good stewardship is sustained when it becomes “who we are,” not only “what we do.”
When children learn that a forest is not just trees but a living sponge that prevents floods, environmental care stops being abstract. It becomes personal. And when they experience school as a place that keeps functioning even in crisis, education becomes not only a right, but a shield.
The Question Sumatra Must Answer
Cyclone Senyar may have been the spark, but the landscape was the tinder. The storms of the future will test Sumatra again, especially as more rainfall extremes are being predicted.
The real measure of recovery is not only how fast roads reopen or how many buildings are rebuilt. It is whether children regain safe routines, whether schools return as anchors of stability, and whether citizens finally repair the ecosystems that decide whether rain becomes water for life or water that takes life.
*Maila Rahiem is an academic and humanitarian worker who lives in Jakarta, where she studies how children’s well-being, education, and community resilience can be strengthened in a changing climate.
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