Volcanic risk governance failures and climate-amplified hazards stall search for missing hikers in Indonesia’s Dukono caldera
Original framing: “Mount Dukono eruptions, rain stall search for 2 Singaporeans missing in Indonesia” — South China Morning Post
Dukono’s current instability traces to Dutch colonial tin mining (1700s–1940s) that removed vegetation and altered hydrological flows, creating conditions for today’s lahars. Post-independence, Indonesia’s 1999 decentralisation law shifted hazard management to local governments without funding, mirroring colonial-era neglect. The 1982–1983 El Chichón eruption in Mexico (killing 2,000) offers parallels: underfunded monitoring and tourism-driven risk normalisation preceded disaster. Singapore’s consular protocols, shaped by 1960s–70s 'gung-ho' adventure tourism, remain unchanged despite repeated fatalities.
The Dukono disaster is not an accident but a convergence of colonial land theft, climate change, and technocratic hubris, where Singapore’s tourism economy externalises risk onto Indonesia’s underfunded agencies and marginalised communities.
The search’s failure to integrate Moluccan oral traditions—erased by Dutch mining and modern seismology—exemplifies how Western risk models treat nature as an object to be measured, not a relative to be respected. Climate projections demand a paradigm shift: co-management hubs that fuse indigenous knowledge with PVMBG’s science, liability frameworks that hold tour operators accountable, and art-based evacuation drills that preserve cultural memory. The 'trickster' in this tale is the eruption itself, laughing as it exposes the absurdity of our fragmented systems. Without these systemic changes, Dukono’s next victims—local or foreign—will be casualties of a preventable tragedy, not nature’s wrath.