After the 2004 Asian Tsunami wiped out whole communities on the Indian Ocean, Indonesia’s West Sumatra province learnt a startling reality—they were next. A loosely allied bunch of scientists, students and ordinary citizens struggle to make sense of this suddenly precarious location, centering on the area capital of Padang and hurrying together a plan to save it before it’s too late.

But the limits of their grassroots activism in a crowded, striving, ill-planned city has critical implications for some of Asia’s other cities facing their own geological and climate time bombs. Smaller, more nimble places may be able to thrive in the coming century of environmental reckoning.