When the rain doesn't stop: climate change and agriculture in Indonesia

Shadi Tavakolimehr
May 24
4 min read

Updated: May 26

Everyone talks about drought when climate change and agriculture come up.

Dry rivers. Cracked soil. Failed harvests.

But what if, in some places, the problem is the exact opposite?

What if the rain doesn’t stop?

That may sound surprising, especially in tropical countries where rain is part of everyday life. But climate change is not just about rising temperatures. It is also about weather becoming less predictable, more intense, and sometimes more extreme. In places where farming depends heavily on weather patterns, climate change and agriculture are closely connected, including in countries like Indonesia.

And crops do not experience these changes equally.

Cassava under climate pressure

Cassava is a good example, though it is not the crop that usually gets the headlines. Coffee does. Cocoa does. Palm oil certainly does.

Cassava is one of the world’s most important staple crops, feeding hundreds of millions of people and supporting livelihoods across the tropics. In Indonesia alone, it remains an important crop, both economically and socially.

What makes cassava interesting is its reputation.

It’s often described as tough. A survivor. A crop that can handle poor soils and harsh conditions better than many others.

So, if even cassava starts showing signs of vulnerability, that should make us pause.

Indonesia is one of the world’s largest cassava-growing countries. But when scientists model different possible climate futures, one pattern appears consistently: nearly 88% of Indonesia’s cassava-growing land could face more than 60 days of unusually heavy rainfall each year, enough to disrupt growing conditions, saturate soils, and increase crop stress.

That is a striking number for a crop often described as resilient.

But rain is only part of the story.

Soil sampling to assess acidic soil conditions affecting agriculture in Indonesia — Acidic soils can quietly increase agricultural vulnerability

The second challenge lies underground.

The hidden challenge beneath the surface

Around 60% of Indonesia’s cassava-growing areas already overlap with highly acidic soils.

Acidic soils make it harder for crops to absorb nutrients and grow well.

Add prolonged wet conditions, and the pressure compounds.

When these two stresses are combined, some projections suggest that more than half of Indonesia’s cassava-growing land could be affected.

Suddenly, resilience starts to look much more fragile. And this is where the conversation becomes bigger than agriculture.

Because climate vulnerability is not just about crops, it’s a systems problem.

Climate stress rarely arrives neatly, one issue at a time.

A farmer is not just dealing with rainfall, but with delayed planting, crop disease, declining yields, nutrient loss, and uncertain incomes, often all at once.

This is where climate conversations often become too simplistic.

We tend to talk about agriculture as if a single climate threat equals a single agricultural response.

Less rain = drought.

More heat = stress.

Problem understood.

But real ecosystems don’t work like that.

In reality, risks stack.

And Indonesia is a particularly important example of this complexity.

As one of the world’s major cassava producers, the country sits at the intersection of tropical agriculture, climate exposure, and food security.

Globally, research suggests that when prolonged heavy rainfall combines with poor soil conditions, the impact could affect over one-fifth of global cassava production in some future climate projections. That’s not a small signal.

And cassava matters precisely because it is considered resilient. But resilience can be a misleading word. We often treat it as if it means immunity, when in reality it simply means a system can cope, up to a point, especially when environmental pressures overlap.

Many of the places where cassava is grown globally already experience high levels of poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition. In other words, climate shocks often hit where resilience is already stretched. That matters not only for food production, but for the people behind it.

If even cassava, a crop known for its toughness, can be challenged by climate extremes, what might that mean for crops that are even more climate-sensitive, such as coffee or cocoa?

But the impact goes beyond conventional crops. In Indonesia, climate uncertainty also affects forest-based livelihoods. Illipe nuts, for example, come from a tree species endemic to Borneo, and for some communities, where Illipe may be one of the few reliable sources of income, heavy rainfall or strong winds can cause an entire collection season to fail. That can mean far more than lost income, threatening household stability, food security, and even the long-term resilience of the ecosystems they depend on.

The real question is not whether climate change will affect agriculture. It already is. The more important question is what happens when environmental and social vulnerabilities overlap, when climate extremes meet degraded ecosystems, fragile livelihoods, and food insecurity.

This is why responses to climate change cannot focus on crops in isolation. Agricultural resilience depends on the health of the wider landscape: soil quality, water regulation, biodiversity, ecosystem diversity, and the economic resilience of the communities that depend on them. A farming system is only as strong as the landscape supporting it.

In countries like Indonesia, where climate pressures, biodiversity loss, and livelihood challenges are deeply interconnected, restoration is not simply about planting trees or recovering degraded land. It is about rebuilding ecological systems in ways that also strengthen local livelihoods, reduce long-term vulnerability, and create more resilient relationships between people and nature.

At Restore the Legacy, we apply this systems perspective to restoration. Healthy forests, productive agroecosystems, and thriving communities are not separate goals, but parts of the same solution. Because in an increasingly unpredictable climate, resilience will not come from a single crop being tough enough to survive. It will come from restoring landscapes that can better support both people and nature through change.