Alarm from Europe and Pentahelix Synergy in Facing the Climate Crisis

The year 2026 seems destined to be recorded in history not for cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, but for nature’s increasingly brutal retaliation. In Europe, a continent that has been the epicentre of advanced public governance, extreme heatwaves have paralysed the pulse of their agriculture. Temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius in parts of France, Spain, and Italy are not merely a weather anomaly, but a monument to modern humanity’s failure to tame the climate crisis. Major rivers that serve as the lifeblood of European agricultural irrigation are shrinking drastically. Recent reports indicate potential losses of billions of euros due to the failure of wheat and other strategic commodity harvests. The question is, if a continent with the most heavily subsidised agricultural infrastructure and supported by precision agricultural technology can be brought to its knees by drought, where does that leave Indonesia?

The Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) has sounded a loud alarm. The peak of the prolonged dry season due to climate anomalies is projected to hit the Nusantara’s food-producing regions in the second half of this year. Yet, our response often remains trapped in bureaucratic engineering and is reactive, only acting when the rice fields crack and farmers cry before social media screens. This phenomenon is more than just a matter of air temperature. The climate crisis is the most tangible proof of German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s thesis on the risk society. Beck warned that modernity and industrialisation have produced global risks that are ‘democratic’ in a terrifying sense: they recognise no territorial boundaries, passports, or social class. Heat and drought cannot be stopped by customs tariffs or any military force. However, resilience in facing them is highly asymmetrical. When Europe is overwhelmed, it has the fiscal cushion to import food massively from other parts of the globe. Unfortunately, this manoeuvre will disrupt global supply chains, triggering international food price spikes that will ultimately strangle developing countries like ours. Herein lies the true test of the food sovereignty vision championed by the government.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen warned, famine almost never occurs in countries with a healthy democratic system. Food crises, according to Sen, are not solely the result of a lack of food availability, but the loss of access rights and people’s purchasing power, an entitlement failure. In the context of the 2026 extreme drought threat, this entitlement failure stalks the most vulnerable groups. When water sources dry up, who gets priority? Is reservoir water channelled to save the people’s rice fields, or siphoned off to keep giant industrial machines and urban commercial areas running? The decision on resource allocation during a crisis is a political process that tests the extent to which our democracy sides with the marginalised. Unfortunately, the state’s approach to food security issues is often too state-centric, technocratic, and top-down. Policies are formulated in Jakarta, then cascaded down in the form of massive programmes that often ignore local ecological carrying capacity. Yet, climate change is a global issue demanding a collective response at the local level that touches universal livelihoods. Philosopher and science sociologist Bruno Latour once quipped that we cannot solve the natural crisis without involving the ‘voice’ of nature and local entities within it.

In facing the threat of the 2026 extreme drought, the state can no longer work alone. The involvement of local civil society becomes a necessity. This aligns with the findings of my team’s research on the effectiveness of local environmental movements in East Java. The study proved that non-state actors have three crucial roles in climate mitigation that often escape the bureaucracy’s reach: performing information-based roles to educate the grassroots, providing direct policy input to local governments, and carrying out operational functions on the ground. Through a persistent strategy of visibility and audibility integrating offline actions and online campaigns, civil movements have proven capable of driving changes in public behaviour, reorienting business practices, and urging the birth of pro-environment policies. Furthermore, the success of environmental campaign agendas at the local level proves the efficacy of the pentahelix collaboration model. Local environmental protection initiatives can run effectively if there is equal orchestration among the five pillars: government, business actors, academics, media, and local communities. Imagine if this model were applied in the mitigation and adaptation to the 2026 drought. Academics and media map vulnerabilities in real-time; business actors and corporations divert their CSR funds not for ceremonial purposes, but to build village reservoirs and micro water infrastructure; while local communities and farmer unions are fully involved as guardians and equitable distributors of water; all supported by responsive government regulations. This collaborative practice should be directed towards the decentralisation of local food systems. Instead of imposing uniformity through massive-scale rice field printing that requires large amounts of water, the government and academics, among others, need to accelerate research on climate-adaptive seeds. At the same time, corporations can absorb alternative non-rice food commodities such as sorghum and tubers. Civil society then takes on the crucial role of campaign agents at the grassroots level to shift citizens’ consumption patterns. Without this cross-sector synergy, food sovereignty amidst the climate crisis is merely rhetoric on paper. The crisis alarm from Europe is a warning.