A ban on developing undeveloped land in Bali has been announced following devastating floods.

Tourism overdevelopment on agricultural land, that might otherwise help to absorb heavy rainfall, has been linked to the recent deadly flooding of the holiday hotspot.

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Construction of new hotels and restaurants on land such as rice fields, will soon be banned.

Last week, at least 18 people were killed by flash flooding on the island, with four people still missing.

Videos on social media show a building collapsing into fast-flowing floodwaters in Denpasar as onlookers watched in horror.

Local environmental activists have welcomed the government’s development crackdown, saying stricter development laws will reduce natural disasters.

The move comes as Bali grapples with the consequences of rapid tourism expansion that has transformed the island’s landscape over recent decades.

Fears for overdevelopment on the island are not only focussed on potentially disaster-prone areas.

A moratorium on new hotels, villas and nightclubs, was floated on the island last year, to preserve indigenous culture, and senior minister Luhut Pandjaitan suggested it could be put in place for a decade.

At the time, figures showed that there were 541 hotels in Bali, up from 507 in 2019.

Last year, dozens of small local businesses were demolished at Bingin Beach, as the settlement which formed at the base of the Uluwatu escarpment in the 1970s was found to have been built on public land, the Balinese House of Representatives said.

There was outrage among locals, cultural heritage conservationists, and the surfing community, amid fears the informal settlement would be replaced by destructive hotel development.

Such harmful excavation was seen during 2024 cliffside construction for the Amali project, a few hundred metres southwest at Impossibles Beach, where much of the natural cliff collapsed into the ocean.