As deadly heatwaves sweep the U.S. and Europe and global climate talks stall, a new vision for climate tech is emerging from Southeast Asia. Indonesia’s Yayasan Peta Bencana (Disaster Map Foundation) has won First Place at the 2025 SAFE STEPS D-Tech Awards for its community-led, open-source, AI-supported disaster platform, PetaBencana.id. More than an accolade, the win is a signal flare: communities aren’t waiting for global agreements—they’re already building scalable, inclusive models for climate adaptation that the world can learn from.
A resident navigates real-time flood reports on PetaBencana.id—an open-source platform powered by community input, showing how collective intelligence is reshaping the future of climate response.
As record-breaking heatwaves sweep the U.S. and Europe, overwhelming infrastructure and pushing health systems to the brink, an open-source, community-built technology from Southeast Asia is being recognized as a global model for climate resilience.
Disaster Map Foundation (Yayasan Peta Bencana), an Indonesian nonprofit, has just won First Place at the 2025 SAFE STEPS D-Tech Awards for its work building a real-time disaster response platform powered not by satellites or AI alone—but by the local wisdom and cooperation of frontline communities.
At a time when the Bonn Climate Talks concluded without meaningful progress, and global negotiations stall in the face of compounding crises, this award signals a growing international recognition: solutions aren’t waiting in Geneva or Washington—they’re working in Jakarta.
“We’ve proven that large-scale, community-led climate action is not only possible, it is already happening,” said Nashin Mahtani, Director of Yayasan Peta Bencana.
Since launching in 2017, PetaBencana.id (“Disaster Map Indonesia”) has grown into Southeast Asia’s largest people-powered disaster information platform, used by over 200 million people across the region. More than 900 humanitarian organizations now rely on its open data streams to coordinate rapid response.
The platform’s integration into Indonesia’s national disaster management systems demonstrates how local knowledge and formal institutions can work in synergy. Government agencies publicly recognize it as the fastest and most reliable source of real-time information. It is a model of how community insight, when structurally embedded, can strengthen national capacity for climate adaptation.
This infrastructure is now replicated across the region through the Disaster Map Foundation, which has developed a method for localizing the software. In the Philippines, the platform operates as MapaKalamidad.ph, in use since 2020 and adopted by the national government’s emergency response system.
But the real innovation lies in how the technology is governed: through gotong royong, the Indonesian practice of mutual aid and collective responsibility. Citizens, not just authorities, drive decision-making and response coordination—making the platform radically democratic, inclusive, and fast.
June 2025 has already been one of the hottest months in recorded history, with lethal heatwaves across southern Europe and the southern U.S. At the same time, the UN climate negotiations in Bonn (SB62) stalled on key issues like adaptation finance and loss-and-damage implementation, drawing sharp criticism from frontline nations and civil society.
Yayasan Peta Bencana’s win is not just an accolade, it is a signal flare: we don’t have to wait for slow-moving global deals to act on climate. Communities have already built models that work—models that the rest of the world, including cities in the U.S. and Europe, can learn from.
The SAFE STEPS D-Tech Awards—organized by Prudence Foundation in partnership with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), UNDRR, AWS, and Echelon—recognize innovations that reduce disaster risk and build resilience. Yayasan Peta Bencana took First Place in the Smart Resilience track, emerging from over 100 applications across 31 countries.