Indonesia

By the end of the twenty-first century, Indonesia will still possess a tourism economy, but it will be one that the travelers of today would scarcely recognize. The archipelago that built much of its modern appeal on warm shallow seas and coral gardens will have watched a great deal of that natural capital erode, while a different and more durable set of attractions—highland landscapes, volcanic geology, cultural heritage, forests, wellness retreats, and faith-based travel—moves to the center of the national offer. The shape of that transformation is not a matter of chance. It will be decided less by the climate itself than by the governance choices Indonesia makes in the decades immediately ahead, and by whether the country can channel both tourism revenue and the benefits of new technology toward the communities that have long borne the costs of welcoming the world.

The climatic backdrop to this story is sobering but not apocalyptic. Under a central emissions pathway, national average temperatures are likely to rise by something on the order of 1.6 degrees Celsius by the closing decades of the century, with inland regions of Kalimantan and Sumatra warming faster than the maritime average. What makes even modest warming dangerous near the equator is humidity, which pushes the human body toward its thermal limits at lower air temperatures than in drier climates. The practical consequence for tourism is that lowland and coastal outdoor activity during the dry season becomes physiologically taxing, steadily redirecting demand toward the highlands, toward indoor and wellness experiences, and toward cooler shoulder seasons. Rainfall is the least predictable variable, but the robust expectation is intensification at both extremes: heavier downpours that trigger flash floods and landslides, alongside longer dry spells that raise the risk of peatland and forest fires and the transboundary haze that has long shadowed the region's reputation.

The sea poses the most consequential threat. Sea-level rise of roughly half a meter is plausible under the central case, but the local picture is far more severe because much of Java's north coast is sinking under its own weight and groundwater extraction, with parts of Jakarta subsiding by as much as eleven centimeters a year. Researchers have warned that more than a hundred small and medium islands could disappear beneath the waves by 2100, the majority of them lost to rising seas. Beneath the surface, the Coral Triangle—of which Indonesia is the biodiverse heart—faces the gravest prospect of all. Equatorial reefs are the most vulnerable on the planet and gain the least from global mitigation efforts, and projections point toward severe, widespread degradation of shallow coral systems by the latter half of the century. The dive tourism that flourished at places such as Raja Ampat, Wakatobi, and Bunaken will not vanish entirely, but it will survive chiefly at deeper sites, at refugia cooled by upwelling currents, and at reefs actively restored and managed with heat-tolerant corals.

Bali offers an instructive case, because its most acute crisis is not yet climate but water. The island's tourism sector consumes the great majority of its water, its aquifers have been drawn down dramatically, and the subak irrigation system that underpins both its rice terraces and its cultural identity is being squeezed as fields give way to villas and resorts. With foreign arrivals having surpassed their pre-pandemic peak, the pressure is intense, and a significant share of the revenue flows to operators based outside Bali, draining benefit away from the communities whose landscape draws the visitors. The likely trajectory is one of enforced tourist caps and levies, mandates on water recycling, managed retreat from eroding beachfront, and a partial revival of the island's traditional philosophy of harmony among people, nature, and the divine—not merely as heritage branding but as a working framework for governance.

Elsewhere the stresses take different forms. The Komodo dragon, already reclassified as endangered, faces steep habitat loss as seas rise and temperatures climb, and by century's end the wild population is likely to persist mainly in higher-elevation refugia and intensively managed reserves, with tourism around Labuan Bajo continuing under strict limits. In Sumatra and Kalimantan, the forests that shelter orangutans, tigers, elephants, and rhinos remain under pressure from palm oil and illegal logging, and deforestation surged to its highest level in eight years in 2025. Whether these ecosystems endure as a fragmented but partially protected estate, with ecotourism funding their conservation, depends squarely on whether forest-protection commitments are honored. The relocation of the national capital to Nusantara in East Kalimantan, marketed as a forest city, illustrates the same tension between green ambition and on-the-ground clearing. Against these pressures, the highland and volcanic interior stands out for its relative resilience: cooler, less exposed to inundation, and anchored by geological parks and lakes, it is poised to grow in relative importance, as are the mangrove and seagrass systems whose value as coastal protection and carbon stores increasingly rivals their appeal to low-impact visitors.

The social fabric of tourism is shifting alongside the physical one. Indonesia's population, already among the world's largest, is set to keep growing for several more decades before aging and urbanizing, which has direct implications for a labor-intensive service economy and helps explain the appeal of automation. Domestic travel, already the structural backbone of the sector, will increasingly dominate as the middle class expands. Two segments look especially durable. The first is faith and cultural heritage tourism: as the world's largest Muslim-majority nation, Indonesia is a global leader in Muslim-friendly travel, a market growing strongly worldwide, and its religious destinations and cultural monuments rank among the most resilient parts of the national offer. The second is community-based tourism built on equitable revenue-sharing, of which Bunaken's model of returning a portion of entrance fees to local projects remains the clearest template. The persistent obstacle across all of it is leakage—the tendency for value to flow away from local and customary communities—and the central-case future is one of stronger, if uneven, recognition of customary land rights pushed forward by both domestic advocacy and international standards.

Artificial intelligence enters this picture as a genuinely double-edged force. On the constructive side, machine learning applied to satellite, drone, and sensor data already supports deforestation detection, habitat mapping, and reef monitoring across the country, while the national meteorological agency now openly relies on machine learning and deep learning in its forecasting. Flood forecasting tools provide riverine warnings days in advance, and a homegrown landslide-and-flood warning system installed across hundreds of villages has become the basis for an international standard and has demonstrably saved lives. For a nation strung along the Ring of Fire and exposed to floods, fires, and tsunamis, AI-enhanced early warning is a real boon for residents and visitors alike, and the same tools can manage tourist flows, ease overtourism, and optimize clean-power microgrids on remote islands. Yet the technology carries its own footprint. Indonesia is fast becoming a regional data-center hub, and these facilities are thirsty: in Batam, planned data centers have been projected to consume volumes of water comparable to the daily needs of tens of thousands of people, already provoking local protests. With the national grid still heavily dependent on coal, rapid AI growth risks raising emissions unless clean power scales quickly. Beyond energy and water, AI threatens to concentrate tourism value in a handful of global platforms, to displace guides and service workers, to widen the divide between connected hubs and remote islands, and to erode the human cultural mediation that gives community tourism its meaning.

This is why governance, not technology, is the decisive variable. Indonesia has committed to reaching net zero around 2060, with forestry as the linchpin of its strategy and an energy transition meant to lift renewables to a dominant share of power by mid-century. The honest assessment is that current policies fall short: renewable targets have been missed, captive coal for nickel smelting is expanding, deforestation has surged, and the central forestry commitment has faced calls for review. The most plausible future is therefore one of partial and delayed implementation—enough to avoid the worst outcomes domestically, but well short of the most ambitious path. Within that frame, the strategy of spreading tourism beyond Bali through a set of priority destinations is likely to mature, with the cultural, highland, and carefully managed marine sites faring best. The optimistic version of 2100 features enforced climate commitments, clean-powered data centers, regenerative and equitable tourism, protected refugia for reefs and Komodo dragons, and recognized customary rights, yielding a smaller-footprint, higher-value, fairer industry. The pessimistic version sees reef tourism collapse, coastal abandonment, recurrent heat and haze closures, extractive industries overriding conservation, and marginalized communities. The central, most likely outcome lies between: a transformed sector in which the sea retreats from old certainties, the highlands and the culture rise in their place, technology pervades everything unevenly, and the question of who benefits remains unresolved enough to matter. Indonesia will still be one of the world's great destinations in 2100. What it sells, and to whose advantage, is what the coming decades will decide.