Prabowo Instructs BMKG to Strengthen El Niño Anticipatory Measures
President Prabowo Subianto has instructed ministries and agencies to take a series of steps to address the potential impacts of the dry season coinciding with the El Niño phenomenon. The directive was delivered during a limited meeting at the Merdeka Palace, Jakarta, on Tuesday, 28 July 2026.
Head of the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG), Teuku Faisal Fathani, stated after the meeting that BMKG would strengthen support in facing this year’s dry season, which coincides with El Niño. Faisal said the measures would be carried out through efforts to maintain water availability in reservoirs and through weather modification operations.
“Also, to anticipate forest and land fires by wetting fire-prone lands through weather modification. There was a lot of reinforcement about weather modification earlier,” Faisal said, as quoted from a press statement by the Presidential Secretariat.
Faisal explained that six provinces are the main focus for the implementation of weather modification operations. These regions are Riau, Jambi, South Sumatra, West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, and South Kalimantan. The operations will be carried out periodically to maintain the moisture of peatlands so they do not easily catch fire.
“Periodic weather modification operations are also carried out to saturate the soil there, the peat soil, so it is not easily burned. This includes conducting weather modification in the Riau Islands, and also in Aceh, in several places situationally depending on the situation and conditions,” he said.
Furthermore, Faisal stated that weather modification measures would also be utilised to assist in filling a number of reservoirs across various regions of Indonesia to anticipate drought. This effort is carried out through cross-ministerial and institutional cooperation—for example, with the Ministry of Forestry and the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB)—to maintain water availability for hydroelectric power plants (PLTA), irrigation, and clean water needs.
“Filling the reservoirs in Indonesia, we have 240 reservoirs, we are trying to fill several, not all of them, so they can be used for PLTA, for irrigation, and for clean water,” he said.
Faisal added that both measures are part of the government’s strategy to prioritise prevention efforts against drought and forest fires. According to him, this approach is an improvement on previous handling, which focused more on extinguishing fires after they occurred.
“Not just waiting for hotspots to appear, then extinguishing them with water bombing, then with sprayed extinguishers, and so on,” Faisal said.