Tb. Arie Rukmantara, Jakarta – Environmentalists and government officials on Thursday urged the immediate relocation of people living and working in flood plains or hilly areas to prevent massive human casualties, as more landslides and flooding disasters would probably occur in the near future.

Director-general of the Bogor-based Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) David Kaimowitz told The Jakarta Post that the sharp increase in economic and human losses attributed to flooding was simply caused by the fact that more people were living and working in flood plains.

"Deforestation and illegal logging may have contributed in a minor way to landslides. But in this case, it is because more and more people are now living in very vulnerable places," Kaimowitz said over the phone from New York.

"As a result, many floods that previously would have been only minor events now become major disasters." Executive director of state forestry company Perhutani Transtoto Handadhari agreed with Kaimowitz, saying relocation was the only choice to avoid loss of human life.

However, Transtoto said his company lacked funds to move people who lived in disaster-prone areas to safer places.

In his recent study,"Forests and Floods: Drowning in Fiction or Thriving on Facts?", Kaimowitz found no scientific evidence linking large-scale flooding and landslides to deforestation.

The study says that as far back as the 19th century and continuing to the present, the conventional view has been that forests prevent floods by acting as giant sponges, soaking up water during heavy rainfalls.

"But the massive floods that are blamed on deforestation almost always occur after prolonged periods of rains, which saturate the soil, including forest soil, so that it can no longer absorb additional water. Rainfall then has nowhere to go but into rivers where it fills them to the point of overflow," the study says.

Transtoto confirmed the study, saying that his company assessment showed that the flooding in Jember and the landslides in Banjarnegara were a result of massive and lengthy rainfall.

He said that before the disaster, about 115 millimeters of water per day, three days in a row had hit Jember, while rain came down for 15 hours per day for eight days running in Banjarnegara, eroding soils in forest areas.

"We found that 92 percent of forest areas there are still covered by trees, while another 8 percent was lost to plantations set up by the locals," said Transtoto, whose company manages some 3,000 hectares of production forests in Jember.

He urged the government to take drastic measures to save people living in flood plains and hilly areas as he projected that the heavy rain would continue in Java until February. "My company has found 20 spots across Java, mostly in West Java, which are prone to similar disasters," he said.

In the short term, he suggested that the government build spillways in disaster-prone areas. A spillway is a structure used to provide for the controlled release of flood flows from a dam or levee into a downstream area, typically being the river that has been dammed.