Floods a reckoning for Bali as overdevelopment strains infrastructure, waste management system

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Workers repairing an area where a large sinkhole formed during recent flooding in Badung, on Indonesias resort island of Bali.

PHOTO: AFP

DENPASAR – Standing where her family home once was, Ms Ruth Deidree Boelan closed her eyes and prayed for relatives missing in devastating flash floods that swept resort island Bali in 2025.

The deluge that killed at least 18 people

It was caused partly by record rain, but was also a reckoning for years of rampant overdevelopment and a waste management system under enormous strain.

The island’s formerly verdant south has been transformed by a tourism boom that brought jobs and economic benefits, but also paved over and built on paddy fields and coconut groves that once provided drainage.

The changes are made starkly clear in comparisons by conservation start-up The TreeMap’s Nusantara Atlas project, which paired declassified Cold War-era US spy images of the island with recent satellite photos.

“All this land is now turned into roads or buildings. The soil doesn’t have the same capability to absorb the water,” The TreeMap founder David Gaveau explained.

More than 4.6 million foreign tourists visited Bali from January to August 2025, outstripping the island’s native population of 4.4 million.

The infrastructure that caters to them has prompted “land conversion, chaotic urban management and lax enforcement of spatial planning laws”, said Mr Made Krisna Dinata, executive director of NGO Walhi Bali.

In recent months, authorities have