Staff Reporter

Massive floods and landslides across Southeast and South Asia, triggered by two powerful cyclones, have claimed the lives of over 1,150 people in less than a week, with the death toll rising sharply today, largely in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

The catastrophe, which has also severely impacted Thailand and Malaysia, is being driven by Cyclones Senyar and Ditwah, whose extreme moisture and rain intensity have overwhelmed regions already vulnerable due to fragile infrastructure and weak disaster preparedness.

Indonesia has reported the highest number of fatalities, reaching 604, with another 464 people still missing on the western island of Sumatra.

Meanwhile, the death toll in Sri Lanka has climbed to 366, with 367 still unaccounted for.

Thailand and Malaysia have reported 176 and three deaths, respectively, bringing the combined total to over 1,150.

“The effect was harshest on the poorer sections of society that had their homes and farms wiped out,” said climate scientist Roxy Mathew Koll highlighting that while cyclone warnings were accurate, authorities failed to translate a meteorological alert into safety on the ground.

Climate experts argue that the sheer scale of the disaster is less a failure of forecasting and more a consequence of decades of unplanned growth and a lack of regulation, described as the last mile of disaster preparedness.

Adding a controversial element to the destruction, the Indonesian government has pledged to investigate the origin of huge piles of washed-up logs seen crowding shorelines and piling up where homes once stood in Sumatra.

Indonesia has lost 320,000 square kilometers of tree cover between 2001 and 2024, an amount equivalent to about 20% of its total tree cover area in 2000.

The devastation has created a deepening humanitarian crisis as Save the Children reports that tens of thousands of children are out of school, with about 76,000 affected in southern Thailand and at least 1,000 schools damaged or used as shelters in Indonesia.