Jakarta (VNA) - The IndonesianGovernment will double its disaster response budget to 15 trillion rupiah (1.06 billion USD) in 2019 after a series of major natural disasters devastatedthree regions of the vast archipelago last year.

Indonesian Minister of Finance SriMulyani Indrawati said on January 8 that the government spent more than 7trillion rupiah on disaster mitigation in 2018. The budget fund did not only goto the National Disaster Mitigation Board (BNPB) but also financed otherrelated activities.

The Indonesian Government also plans toform pooling fund, through which it pools fund from each region for disastermitigation efforts, she said.

To carry out disaster mitigation programmes,the Indonesian Government has also learned from the Philippines, which isfrequently affected by typhoons, and Latin American countries, which are oftenstruck by earthquakes, the minister revealed.

The Government of Indonesia began toprepare a disaster insurance mechanism by setting aside 1 trillion rupiah worthof pooling fund to speed up the recovery of the affected areas.

The fund can be disbursed by taking into account the extentof natural disasters, including the number of victims and the amount ofmaterial losses.

The Southeast Asian country suffered its deadliest yearin over a decade in 2018, when over 3,000 people died in tsunamis andearthquakes in Sulawesi, Lombok, and West Java and Sumatra islands.

Last month, 437 people were killed along thecoasts of the Sunda Strait after a landslide on Anak Krakatau volcano sentwaves up to five meters high crashing into western Java and southern Sumatra.

This followed a double quake-and-tsunamidisaster in Sulawesi that killed over 2,000 people in September, and a seriesof major earthquakes that flattened much of the northern coast of the holidayisland of Lombok in August.

Indonesia straddles the seismically active Pacific Ringof Fire and sees frequent earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, andlocalized incidents like landslides, floods, and forest fires.-VNA