Nowadays, the frequency and intensity of hydrometeorological disasters in Indonesia in recent years are relatively high. Nationally, the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB) recorded 3,176 disaster events throughout 2025 (Kompas, 2025). It is mostly dominated by hydrometeorological disasters (floods, extreme weather, and landslides) (Periskop, 2025). One of them is Tropical Cyclone Senyar which formed on November 25-26, 2025 and triggered very heavy, which is extreme rain in Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra, resulting in flash floods and extensive landslides (BMKG, 2025). Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) emphasized that Senyar was formed from 95B seeds in the Strait of Malacca and triggered the massive growth of convective clouds, with a follow-up impact in the form of strong winds and high waves in the waters west of Sumatra. Conditions that stimulate a layered vulnerability pattern from volcanic areas with deposits of eruptive material that are prone to lava during rain and coastal corridors or Sumatran mountains that are prone to floods and landslides during weather system anomalies (CNN Indonesia, 2025b). The impact of the disaster creating the crisis in Sumatra by the end of 2025 is enormous. The BNPB update as of December 2025–January 2026 reported hundreds to more than a thousand deaths in the three provinces (the number continues to move as the search and verification process continues) (Media Indonesia, 2025). On the other hand, millions of people were affected and hundreds of thousands were displaced in various districts/cities, while tens to hundreds of thousands of houses were damaged at various levels (BeritaSatu, 2026). Damage to vital infrastructure includes national roads, bridges, health facilities, educational facilities, and houses of worship, resulting in delays in basic services, especially health, education, and food distribution, with potentially long-term socio-economic effects (CNN Indonesia, 2025a). Conditions that confirm two things, namely 1) hydrometeorological disasters remain dominant and dynamic in a short span of time, and 2) the integration of weather early warning into contingency emergency operations is crucial to avoid fatalities, accelerate evacuation, and ensure logistics flow. These observable conditions are further amplified by three institutional dynamics occurring in parallel. First, Indonesia’s disaster-risk profile has shifted markedly toward compound hydrometeorological events, with BNPB data showing that flood, landslide, and extreme-weather events now consistently account for more than ninety percent of annual disaster incidents over the last five years, a trend consistent with global climatization of policing mandates documented by Matczak and Bergh (2023) and Lydon et al. (2025). Second, policy developments at the national level, ranging from presidential directives on multi-sector disaster response, the operationalization of forecast-based early action within BNPB and BMKG, to the repositioning of Polri’s role through the Presisi doctrine and the Asta Cita program, signal an institutional reorientation toward humanitarian-ecological policing rather than purely repressive enforcement. Third, public debate following the 2025 Sumatra crisis has increasingly questioned the adequacy of conventional policing models in coping with climate-induced emergencies, echoing a broader scholarly concern on adaptive policing for a climate crisis (Blaustein et al., 2024). Taken together, these dynamics justify the urgency of examining the “Eco-Cop” transformation as a present-day phenomenon rather than a purely conceptual proposition.

Therefore, President Prabowo Subianto and all institutional leaders have mobilized multi-sectoral responses regarding disaster management and recovery (Sekretariat Presiden, 2025). The factors of speed, precision, and consistency of actions from all elements of government to ensure the safety and recovery of affected citizens are the government’s priorities (MetroTV News, 2025). Polri Chief General (Kapolri) Listyo Sigit Prabowo followed up on President Prabowo Subianto’s instructions by strengthening the deployment of Polri personnel for disaster management in Sumatra (DivHumas Polri, 2025). In the emergency response phase to the recovery transition, Polri plays a strategic role in restoring access and stabilizing security. Kapolri reported the deployment of ±11,625 personnel in Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra to support evacuation, construction of emergency facilities, logistical escort, and basic service support in the affected areas (Antara, 2025). In line with this, there has been a shift in operational strategy from routine enforcement to humanitarian operations in disaster areas and a focus on opening access and escorting ambulance relays, fuel, and relief logistics (DetikNews, 2025). In field practice, all units become pathfinders for heavy equipment and relief convoys and operate “green-wave” – consecutive priority for emergency/logistics vehicles on specific corridors to cut travel times and reduce the risk of secondary incidents (KorlantasPolri, 2025).

Conditions that indicate that the police are not only carrying out their main duties, but diversifying includes protective-ecological functions. This is in line with maintaining the continuity of social and ecological life in the pre, during, and post-disaster phases or also known as “climate change policing” (Angalapu et al., 2024). Climate change, environmental degradation, and migration place natural disasters as the main slice of the main task of Polri. Complex situations that require synergy and integration of stakeholders in evacuation flows, logistical disruptions, security risks at evacuation sites, and potential opportunistic crimes in the affected areas (Parnaby, 2021). It is in this context that the idea of “Eco-Cop” was first born from Matczak (2025b), namely a policing approach that integrates environmental preparedness, public safety, and humanist governance. This idea is even more urgent in the context of the hydrometeorological disaster crisis at the end of 2025 in Sumatra and triggers a major holistic impact and disruption of access to vital transportation.

Policing in the context of natural disaster emphasizes the role of the Polri in supporting humanitarian operations more broadly. One of the vital activities is evacuation and disaster victim identification (DVI) in supporting the search for victims by involving teams that identify bodies even though they are often constrained by supporting infrastructure (Adamovic et al., 2023; North et al., 2025). Consolidation of ministries and institutions in maintaining logistics supply chains, escorting the distribution of fuel, clean water, and medicines is prioritized to prevent scarcity and the impact of horizontal conflicts (Merdeka, 2026). In addition, Polri together with the TNI play a role in refugee management, including helping to maintain order at shelter locations, preventing opportunistic crime, and mapping vulnerable groups that need basic service support. Polri also established risk communication by aligning the public messages of BMKG and BNPB so that the public follows the official evacuation route and avoids false information that triggers panic or disruption of flow. Therefore, in the disaster study of Fahad Al-Saedi et al. (2023) emphasizing that the presence of the police as a guardian of the safety of the social ecosystem, maintaining the continuity of basic services, minimizing the risk footprint (fatal congestion, secondary accidents, violence in refugee camps), and restoring the functioning of the local economy by accelerating the re-opening of vital corridors.

In the context of the 2025 Sumatra disaster, the challenge ahead is to make “eco-cop” a contingency standard, from SOPs (nowcasting-based activation thresholds), training (cross-agency simulations), to monitoring (evacuation/logistics travel times, secondary incidents, isolated areas). Thus, Polri plays a role as the safety front line in elaborating information on hydrometeorological analysis, logistics flow management, and access restoration as an operational strategy for policing in natural disasters that is adaptive to the contemporary climate reality in Indonesia.

Although the scholarship on policing and disasters has grown substantially, three gaps motivate this study. Contextually, most empirical work on climate-change policing and adaptive policing has been produced in high-income jurisdictions such as Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States (Blaustein et al., 2024; Hendy et al., 2025; Lydon et al., 2025; Matczak & Bergh, 2023), while studies situated in Southeast Asia, and particularly in the Indonesian archipelagic setting with its compound volcanic–hydrometeorological risk, remain limited to community-based models (Hapsari et al., 2022; Luong et al., 2024). Theoretically, existing studies tend to treat green criminology, resilience policing, the Incident Command System/Early Warning–Early Action framework, and procedural justice as separate analytical lenses (Angalapu et al., 2024; Chang, 2017; Mutongwizo et al., 2022; Nurse, 2022), with limited effort to integrate them into a single operational construct that can be enacted by a national police organization during a compound disaster. Methodologically, much of the Indonesian literature on police disaster response still relies on single-case descriptions or normative legal analysis, leaving a gap for a transparent, structured policy-and-literature review that connects observed operational practice to peer-reviewed theory. This paper contributes along these three fronts by (a) introducing the Indonesian 2025 Sumatra compound-disaster setting as a new context in which the “Eco-Cop” construct is examined; (b) advancing a four-pillar integrative framework that links green criminology, resilience policing, ICS/EWEA, and procedural justice into one contingency-strategy model; and (c) proposing a transparent structured-review methodology together with a set of measurable performance indicators (mean time to re-open critical corridors, evacuation and logistics travel time, secondary incidents, reopened-area coverage, and a legitimacy/procedural-justice index) that can be used as boundary conditions for future empirical testing.

2.1. The Concept of “Eco-Cop”
The term “Eco-Cop” refers to a policing orientation that integrates ecological concern (prevention/enforcement of environmental harms) with public safety in the face of climate disturbances, hydrometeorological disasters, and sustainability transitions. In other words, “Eco-Cop” combines a green criminology lens that focuses on highlighting cross-actor crime and environmental damage with adaptive policing practices against the climate crisis, environmental protests, and natural disasters (Matczak, 2025b). On the other hand, according to Nurse (2022) that green criminology emphasizes ecological impacts that often escape the mainstream of criminal law and are handled by administrative/regulatory regimes rather than police officers. Therefore, the green criminology approach requires a reorganization of the role of law enforcement in order to be able to prevent, act, and restore environmental damage that has a wide impact between generations (Lynch & Long, 2026).

The study of environmental policing and green policing has evolved from the domain of environmental enforcement (waste, wildlife, illegal logging) to a more holistic idea of the capacity of the police to deal with climate change (heat crisis, floods, cyclones) and shifting dangerous landscapes (harmscapes) (Matczak & Bergh, 2023). Up to Matczak (2025a) introducing  the concept of “Eco-Cop” as a spectrum of green organizations ranging from greening operations (fleets, facilities, procurement), policing disasters (humanitarian disaster response), to resilience & adaptive policing (learning and cross-actor networking skills). This model departs from the climatization of how the explanation of the climate crisis changes the mandates, risks, and operations of policing at the level of society, organizations, and individuals (Lydon et al., 2025).

2.2. Policing of Natural Disaster
The term policing in natural disasters refers to the role of the police in the entire disaster cycle, including mitigation–preparedness–response–recovery, both as an actor in emergency management and as a guardian of order and protection of the community. Study of Hendy et al. (2025) shows a shift from the mandate of “enforcement” to the mandate of humanitarian governance, for example distinguishing between survival crimes and non-survival crimes, as well as plural collaboration with the whole. Major post-disaster studies such as Hurricane Katrina also highlight the challenges of multi-agency coordination, police infrastructure systems, and the potential for horizontal conflicts (Deflem & Sutphin, 2009). Thus, it is necessary to centralize the Incident Command System (ICS) to offer a modular-scale structure in bringing together facilities, equipment, personnel, and inter-agency communication that has proven to be effective in improving clarity of roles, coordination, and communication (Chang, 2017). In police practice, as reported by USAID and REAL, the role of ICS significantly assists in the division of tasks (travel, evacuation, security of vital objects), daily incident action plans, and integration of weather intelligence in pre-closure and pre-positioning decisions of all supporting elements in the field (Akerkar et al., 2020).

This study adopts a qualitative structured policy-and-literature review combined with a reading of operational cases (document-based case study), following the logic of a narrative-integrative review. The approach is deliberately chosen because the “Eco-Cop” transformation in Indonesia has not yet produced primary quantitative datasets that can be analyzed inferentially; synthesizing peer-reviewed theory with observable policy and operational documents is therefore the most appropriate strategy to build an initial integrative framework that later studies can test empirically.

The research design is non-empirical, descriptive-analytical, and theory-building in orientation. The unit of analysis is the contingency-policing practice of Polri during compound hydrometeorological disasters, with the 2025 Sumatra disaster (encompassing Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra) as the bounded setting. The population of sources consists of (a) peer-reviewed journal articles and edited book chapters on green criminology, resilience and adaptive policing, policing in disasters, the Incident Command System, early warning–early action, and procedural justice; and (b) official institutional documents and verifiable news reports covering the 2025 Sumatra disaster and Polri operational responses between November 2025 and January 2026.

A purposive sampling technique was applied to both source groups. For the scholarly pillar, the researcher searched Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar using combinations of the keywords “eco-cop,” “green criminology,” “resilience policing,” “adaptive policing,” “climate change policing,” “policing in disasters,” “Incident Command System,” “early warning early action,” and “procedural justice.” Inclusion criteria were: peer-reviewed articles or chapters published between 2017 and 2026, written in English or Bahasa Indonesia, addressing the role of police or security institutions in environmental, climate, or disaster-related settings, and accessible in full text. Exclusion criteria were: non-peer-reviewed opinion pieces, publications with no clear methodology, works that discussed environmental issues without a policing dimension, and duplicates across databases. This process yielded the twenty-two peer-reviewed scholarly works cited in the final manuscript. For the policy and operational pillar, inclusion was limited to official releases from BNPB, BMKG, Polri (Divhumas, Korlantas), the Presidential Secretariat, and news coverage from verifiable national media outlets within the 2025 Sumatra disaster window; items with unclear attribution or solely opinion-based commentary were excluded.

Sample size was determined by theoretical saturation rather than a pre-fixed number; the search was terminated when additional sources ceased to yield new conceptual categories relating to the four pillars of “Eco-Cop.” Data collection was conducted between December 2025 and March 2026 and proceeded in three stages: (1) identification of candidate documents through the database and institutional-website searches; (2) screening of titles, abstracts, and executive summaries against the inclusion and exclusion criteria; and (3) full-text review, thematic coding, and extraction of analytical categories (ecological harm, resilience, command and control, early warning and early action, procedural justice, and operational practice). Thematic coding was performed manually using a category matrix aligned with the four theoretical pillars, and extracted evidence was then triangulated with operational cases from the Sumatra disaster, specifically the “green-wave” corridor priority, heavy-equipment pathfinding, and logistics-lifeline security.

Several steps were taken to minimize bias. First, source triangulation was applied by requiring every operational claim about the 2025 Sumatra disaster to appear in at least two independent sources, typically one institutional release and one news outlet, or two independent news outlets with different editorial orientations. Second, theoretical triangulation was ensured by drawing the conceptual framework from four distinct scholarly streams rather than a single school of thought. Third, to reduce confirmation bias arising from the author’s professional position within Polri, the review deliberately included scholarly work that is critical of traditional policing models in disaster settings, including studies that raise concerns about “over-policed and under-protected” communities and the limits of command-and-control approaches. Fourth, the researcher kept an audit trail of search queries, screening decisions, and coding categories so that the analytical process can be traced and replicated. Finally, the limitations arising from the design, including the absence of primary quantitative data, restricted access to classified operational records, and the potential for publication bias in the reviewed literature, are openly acknowledged in the Conclusion section and framed as an agenda for subsequent empirical research.

4.1. The Role of “Eco-Cop” in Disaster Resilience
“Eco-Cop” has linearity with disaster resilience. Disaster resilience is the capacity of a system, both individuals, communities, and communities to withstand and absorb shocks, adjust, make changes, recover, and bounce back from the impact of disasters, while maintaining and even improving the level of function and well-being (Kurniawati & Kurniajati, 2025). In other words, the presence of “Eco-Cop” is expected to be able to create resilience that includes psychological, social, economic, and infrastructure resilience to be able to face the crisis, get out of the downturn, and rebuild better conditions than before (Mutongwizo et al., 2022). Thus, the “Eco-Cop” that intersects with the main tasks of Polri can include 3 aspects. The first aspect is to create ecological justice and harm principles based on the understanding that the victims of natural disasters and environmental crimes are not only humans, but also ecosystems and non-human species. The consideration is by calculating the degree of damage, risk, and irreversibility in humans and non-humans (Nurse, 2022). The second aspect is multi-level accountability with law enforcement against ecocidal offenders with the need for adaptive legal tools. This aims to answer the political challenge in upholding the supremacy of law for massive damage, both economic and social (Jones et al., 2022). Policing-based “Eco-Cop” approach can strengthen deterrence and environmental compliance mandates (Killean & Short, 2025). Finally, the aspect of legitimacy and procedural justice is vital in crisis situations, where procedural justice (voice, neutrality, respect, trusted motives) contributes to institutional trust and public compliance (Angalapu et al., 2024). This plays a crucial role when the apparatus carries out pre-closure, evacuation, or management of environmental justice demands (Shetty & Saxena, 2025).

In addition, Polri can carry out post-disaster preparedness through enforcement of high-risk environmental violations (Over Dimension Over Loading/ODOL damaging bridges, illegal mining that increases the risk of landslides), critical infrastructure resilience audits, ICS table-top exercises, and the integration of nowcasting in the command center. Risk mitigation responses can comb through green-wave activities and pathfinding of heavy equipment routes, emergency contraflow, protection of vulnerable groups in shelters, procedural justice in the field to maintain the legitimacy of harkamtibmas (Pelengkahu, 2025; Shetty & Saxena, 2025). During the recovery period, the Polri can provide support for restoring access (bailey/aramco bridges), protecting vital assets (petrol stations, clean water), and law enforcement post-disaster fraud or greenwashing recovery. Various indicators of Polri in the context of “Eco-Cop” disaster resilience are based on the MTTR (mean time to re-open) of critical corridors, evacuation/logistics travel time, secondary incidents during operations, and legitimacy/procedural justice score rankings in crisis interactions. In conclusion, “Eco-Cop” is a paradigm that links green criminology, resilience policing, ICS/Early Warning–Early Action (EWEA), and procedural justice into an operational contingency strategy in preventing ecological harm, maintaining the flow of life (evacuation/logistics), and maintaining the legitimacy of Polri in the eyes of the public in the midst of disasters that are increasingly triggered by the climate crisis. This integration is theoretically consistent with peer-reviewed accounts that treat adaptive policing as a structural response to compound climate risk (Blaustein et al., 2024), with the green-criminology emphasis on ecological harm beyond the human-centric frame (Lynch & Long, 2021; Nurse, 2022; Shetty & Saxena, 2025), with the resilience-policing literature that reframes police officers as enablers of polycentric recovery rather than sole enforcers (Mutongwizo et al., 2022; Parnaby, 2021), and with comparative evidence that procedural justice is the principal mediator of public compliance in crisis interactions (Angalapu et al., 2024; Jones et al., 2022). Anchoring the four pillars in this peer-reviewed base strengthens the theoretical validity of the proposed “Eco-Cop” contingency model.

4.2. Strategy of Policing in Natural Disaster         
The policing in natural disaster paradigm emphasizes the professionalism of police personnel in dealing with role conflicts and critical incident stress. Thus, organizations need to mitigate through psychosocial support, work rotation, and skills training (Edwards & Kotera, 2021). In the context of natural disasters, the police carry out flow regulation (diversion, contraflow), priority of ambulance/logistics routes (often called green-wave), evacuation & SAR support, as well as protection of evacuation sites from opportunistic crimes. At the same time, the study examines the risks of “over-policed and under-protected” for marginalized communities when traditional approaches are applied without humanitarian sensitivity; hence the need for collaborative policing that emphasizes community enabling and partnerships (Hapsari et al., 2022). Public compliance with evacuations, pre-closures, and temporary restrictions is heavily influenced by procedural fairness (vote, neutrality, respect, trusted motives). Studies from Cuthbertson & Penney (2023) indicates that tactical decisions can improve the perception of justice, even when decisive intervention is needed. Therefore, the researcher emphasized that the mediation flow between procedural justice is important to increase institutional trust to create the legitimacy of Polri.

Furthermore, the EWEA framework links early warning systems (meteorology, hydrology) with planned action before the peak of danger. International studies and guidelines from USAID/REAL, emphasizing people-centered design, anticipatory funding interconnectedness, and clarity of cross-agency  roles (Akerkar et al., 2020). For the police, reflecting on the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the implication is to establish clear trigger indicators for the activation of strategic operations of logistics lines while still considering humanitarian aspects (Edwards & Kotera, 2021). The goal is to standardize and coordinate medical/food/fuel supplies effectively, starting from document interoperability, resource pooling, to greening the chain. Therefore, Polri plays a role as a lifeline security that guards, secures corridors, and reduces secondary incidents.

Reflecting on post-disaster management, adaptive policing is needed in dealing with the climate crisis. This includes ICS readiness, personnel facility and infrastructure support, coordination of cross-agency after-action reviews, and community partnerships (Blaustein et al., 2024; Luong et al., 2024). In conclusion, policing in natural disasters is not just an extension of ordinary law enforcement, but more specifically a humanitarian-security framework based on ICS/EWEA, resilience policing, procedural justice, and humanitarian logistics interfaces. Combined with the “Eco-Cop” approach, it becomes an effective and socially valid contingency strategy. Therefore, the researcher formulated a disaster resilience strategy that can be implemented in several steps as follows: First, coordination of governmental, institutional, and social organizations to create community resilience. The resilience policing approach positions the Polri as enablers that help communities withstand and bounce forward from disasters through collaborative forums and polycentric governance. Second, the establishment of a Command-Control Task Force through the Incident Command System (ICS) pathway that is able to unite multi-agencies in a modular, reliable, and adaptive manner in volatile situations. This is to maintain flexibility without losing the discipline of one-stop command. Third, information synergy through EWEA through the integration of early warning and early action (including forecast-based financing). This action calculates the pre-positioning of resources, pre-closure of vulnerable corridors, and “humanitarian green-wave” for all logistics lines based on priority levels. Fourth, optimizing the humanitarian logistics interface by implementing interoperability, digitalization, and greening the supply chain standards. Polri as a lifeline security needs to understand the flow standards  so that the logistics line runs safely, quickly, and accountably.

This paper emphasizes that the transformation of “Eco-Cop”, namely a policing orientation that integrates ecological concerns, public safety, and humanitarian governance, is the most relevant contingency strategy for the current Indonesian context, especially after the 2025 Sumatra hydrometeorological disaster. The crisis shows that disasters are now moving fast, have a massive impact, go beyond sectoral boundaries, and demand the role of the Polri which is no longer just repressive, but enabling-humanitarian. This includes maintaining the continuity of life flows (evacuation, health services, logistics), protecting vulnerable groups, and stabilizing the security of communities and critical infrastructure. Conceptually, “Eco-Cop” unites four pillars, namely 1) Green criminology (prevention/enforcement of ecological harm and multi-level accountability), 2) Resilience policing (resilience of organizations and communities through polycentric partnerships), 3) ICS/EWEA approach (agile cross-agency commands and warnings)early action based on trigger indicators), and 4) The principle of procedural justice (public legitimacy as a prerequisite for compliance in times of crisis). The four pillars can be operationalized through a set of contingency strategies, including green-wave and pathfinding for ambulances/logistics and heavy equipment, pre-closure of vulnerable corridors based on nowcasting, emergency contraflow, lifeline security (petrol stations, clean water, health facilities), selective enforcement of high-risk violations (e.g. ODOL that threatens bridges), and integrated risk communication with early warning authorities.

In addition, the researchers acknowledge the limitations of the need for causal quantitative evidence on the impact of policy packages, the availability of real-time data across agencies, and generalization testing outside Sumatra. The researcher also suggested the next research agenda in measuring the magnitude of the effect of “Eco-Cop” on the acceleration of evacuation/logistics, the reduction of secondary incidents, and the increase of legitimacy in various disaster typologies (volcanic, flash floods, cyclones). In the end, it is hoped that the transformation of the “Eco-Cop” can place Polri as the safety guard of the social ecosystem by combining hydrometeorological information, flow management, community protection, and access restoration in one operating framework that is adaptive, measurable, and fair based on the Polri Presisi. With the support of regulations, resources, and cross-agency partnerships, “Eco-Cop” has a real opportunity to reduce fatalities, accelerate recovery, and maintain the resilience of the Indonesian people in the midst of escalating climate risks to realize the Asta Cita Program.