Warga Bantu Warga! Climate Finance From Below: Community-led flood recovery after Cyclone Senyar in Sumatra, Indonesia

Overview

Cyclone Senyar struck northern Sumatra in late November–December 2025, bringing extreme rainfall, flash floods, and severe river erosion across Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra. Thousands of homes were buried in mud or rendered uninhabitable, forcing widespread displacement and disrupting rural livelihoods. Despite the scale of destruction, the Indonesian government declined to designate the event as a national disaster, limiting access to international humanitarian assistance and climate-related recovery funding. This article examines how affected communities mobilised their own financial and social resources in the absence of formal climate finance. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted between December 2025 and February 2026 in flood-affected districts across Sumatra, including interviews with displaced residents, farmers, plantation workers, and village leaders, the study analyses community-led strategies of survival and recovery. The findings show how households relied on informal financial practices, religious charity, kinship remittances, and collective labour – locally described as warga bantu warga (citizens helping citizens) – to rebuild homes, restore livelihoods, and support displaced neighbours. These practices constitute forms of climate finance from below, where communities generate adaptive responses through everyday solidarities despite institutional absence. Situated within feminist political ecology and critical agrarian studies, the article argues that community-led recovery represents both a practical mechanism of resilience and a response to structural exclusions within national and global climate finance systems.