Indonesia: Visualization of Jakarta metropolitan area’s flood through mobile phone application

Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Jakarta Province Regional Disaster Management Agency (BPBD) regarding the cooperation to develop a flood-related information system. Based on the MoU, an application for Android-based smartphones has been developed that can effectively collect from and distribute to the people the relevant information on flood in Jakarta metropolitan area. The application has been officially launched on March 16, 2015 (Mon).

Floods – as well as traffic congestion - has been one of the main problems faced by the Jakarta and hampering not only the development of the capital city, but also its surrounding areas. When flood occurs, one of the issues is the lack of access of the people to the fast and accurate disaster information, which is still limited to television and radio broadcasts. Meanwhile, related governmental institutions are facing difficulty to secure funding for advanced observation network system with water-level sensor and so on, thus hampering disaster mitigation efforts.

With such background, the application was developed*, enabling the users to not only receive information on flood from BPBD’s Disaster Information Management System (DIMS) through push notifications, but also to share information on flood and inundation in his/her surrounding area through map data. By receiving real-time information, quick decision could be made and quick action could be taken, for instance to evacuate a specific area. Meanwhile, with the increase in the amount of disaster information, the Jakarta BPBD could utilize the data for hazard analysis.

In Japan, social media has also been utilized for the verification of landslide-disaster occurrence detection technique, developed by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism (MLIT) together with the Fujitsu Laboratories, Ltd. Therefore, it is hoped that such efforts would not only bring good results within Indonesia and Japan, but also for disaster management in other countries.

In the future, it is hoped that the application will not only be further developed and utilized for flood-related information collection and distribution, but also beneficial for the daily lives of the people by providing other information.

The application can be downloaded for free from Google’s Play Store: (available in English, Indonesian, and Japanese languages).

* The smartphone application was developed by PT. Fujitsu Indonesia, which also developed BPBD Jakarta’s Disaster Information Management System (DIMS) in December 2013.