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Environmental woes may get worse in 2020: Activists
With the persistent problems of air pollution, waste, lack of zoning plans for coastal areas, as well as massive flooding that hit the capital city at the beginning of this year, Jakarta is in the mid of an ecological crisis that will only get worse if stakeholders do little to improve the environment, a group of environmentalists has warned
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span>With the persistent problems of air pollution, waste, lack of zoning plans for coastal areas, as well as massive flooding that hit the capital city at the beginning of this year, Jakarta is in the mid of an ecological crisis that will only get worse if stakeholders do little to improve the environment, a group of environmentalists has warned.
A restoration campaigner for the Jakarta chapter of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), Rehwinda Naibaho, raised concerns that with the current trend, Jakarta may face a worsening environmental crisis in 2020.
“We project that people in Jakarta will still have to deal with pollution,” Rehwinda said in a discussion on Wednesday.
She pointed out that water pollution remained a persistent problem in the city, citing data from Jakarta Environment Agency that found rivers and lakes in the city were consistently polluted. The data in 2017 showed that 61 percent of Jakarta rivers were heavily polluted, 27 percent were moderately polluted, while 12 percent were lightly polluted.
Groundwater, which millions of Jakartans rely on for their daily needs, is also not free from pollution as the same data recorded that only 32 percent of groundwater in the capital’s soil was clean from pollution.
“There have not been any efforts to reduce this pollution,” Rehwinda said.
Air pollution is also a persistent problem that has finally caught the public’s attention, as throughout 2018 and 2019 Jakarta was named among the most polluted cities in the world according to the Air Quality Index (AQI) by Airvisual.
Rehwinda said one of the causes of air pollution was the lack of green space in the city to filter it out, something that had not been seriously addressed by the city administration.
A city must be at least 30 percent green space according to the 2007 Spatial Planning Law. However, Jakarta’s green space makes up just 9.9 percent of its total area due to a lack of available land, the city has repeatedly argued.
An environmental lawyer with the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL), Fajri Fadhillah, said that based on data from air quality monitors at the United States Embassy’s building in South Jakarta alone, the city experienced more unhealthy days than healthy days in terms of air pollution.
Based on the AQI matrix measuring PM 2.5, Jakarta experienced seven unhealthy days in 2017, 50 in 2018, and a whopping 85 days in 2019, concentrated during the dry season from April to October.
“This is worrying if accepted as inevitable,” Fajri said.
But he commended that amid the worrying the trend, advocacy for cleaner air had gained traction among the public, Fajri said.
A group of concerned citizens grouped under the Jakarta Advocacy Movement Team filed a lawsuit against the central government as well as the Jakarta, Banten and West Java administrations to push for greater efforts to combat the silent killer. The lawsuit, which is still ongoing, also prompted the city administration to issue a 2019 Gubernatorial Instruction on air pollution control in August, which highlighted measures to reduce air pollution.
The Jakarta Bay and the Thousand Islands regency, although separated from the mainland, also bear the brunt of pollution from the city.
The Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) found that 8.3 tons of waste flowed into the Jakarta Bay daily, drifted into the open seas and caused problems for islanders living in the bay.
“On top of the pollution, island privatization is also threatening people’s livelihoods in the Jakarta Bay,” Rehwinda said.
According to data compiled by the People's Coalition for Fisheries Justice (KIARA), 86 out 110 islands in Thousand Islands regency are privately owned.
Farid of KIARA said the problems on the coasts were inseparable from the mainland, as policies conducted from the mainland such as land reclamation and the giant sea wall project disturbed the Jakarta Bay’s natural ecosystem
Farid lambasted Jakarta for having yet to issue a bylaw on its Zoning Plan and Coastal Northern Territory (RZWP3K), adding that fishermen and coastal communities should be involved in the process as their livelihoods are at risk.
“The zoning draft bylaw must be discussed again with fishermen and coastal communities because Jakarta’s ecological sustainability is very important [to them],” Farid said.
Walhi found that the administration of Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan had issued 17 regulations concerning the environment, however their implementation is still lacking and they have yet to be able to resolve Jakarta’s ecological problems.
“We don’t just want policies. It’s easy for the government to make policies. But they have yet to be implemented,” Walhi Jakarta chapter head Tubagus Soleh Ahmadi said.
Tubagus pointed out how the government handled the recent massive flooding. While all government parties should have been working toward the same goal, the central government and city administration were instead embroiled in a debate over river normalization or river naturalization to fix the city’s flooding problem.
He urged the city to focus on implementing the policies it had created regarding the environment rather than making new policies but without executing them.
