Jakarta's environment: Lessons from abroad

Jakarta's environment: Lessons from abroad

Edward McMillan
Jakarta

Can you imagine paying a "congestion charge" every time you
drive your car into the city centre? How about growing your own
vegetables? Or using solar energy to heat your tap-water? How
does paying for several dozen trees to be planted each year sound
to you? The World Cities Leadership Summit recently held in
London highlighted a range of innovative approaches cities are
turning to as they grapple with environmental deterioration and
unsustainable growth. And most of them beg the question: Why
can't Jakarta do that too?

That Jakarta is in desperate need of environmental restoration
is, of course, not news. After all, this is a city that is
regularly paralyzed by flooding and experiences just 26 days of
"good" air quality a year. But less well known is the sheer scale
of Jakarta's ecological impact, which extends well beyond the
city's boundaries.

If the city's use of natural resources, food and energy is
taken fully into account, Jakarta's true "ecological footprint"
is enormous. Every man, woman and child in the city currently
requires the equivalent of 1.2 hectares of land to provide the
resources they consume each year. That adds up to an area 165
times larger than the city itself -- an area the size of South
Korea.

That isn't as large as some cities -- London's ecological
footprint is equivalent in area to the entire United Kingdom,
whilst Tokyo's is 85 percent larger still -- but it's clearly
unsustainable. With continuing population growth and growing
demand for hitherto "luxury" items such as cars, refrigerators
and air conditioning by an expanding middle class, Jakarta's
ecological footprint could increase by as much as 40 percent over
the next decade. That's larger than the Netherlands, Belgium,
Switzerland and Albania combined.

And that spells problems. For a start, there simply may not be
enough resources to go around. The World Wildlife Fund, an
international conservation group, estimates that mankind's total
ecological footprint is already the equivalent of 1.2 Earths:
That we are using 20 percent more natural resources -- notably
fossil fuels -- each year than can be regenerated. In effect,
we're running an enormous resource "overdraft".

And it also represents further deterioration of an already-
fragile environment. Each new car -- and there are 267 of them
every day in Jakarta -- adds to air pollution; each new house
adds to the city's energy burden and to its household waste.

So what can be done? Unfortunately, the city authorities have
a woeful record when it comes to managing the environment. Their
traditional defense has always been that environmental fixes are
for developed-world cities: Developing world cities like Jakarta
need to focus on economic growth and job creation, and, anyway,
cannot afford expensive environmental projects.

The World Cities Leadership Summit definitively challenged
this line of complacent thinking. In the course of the summit, it
quickly became clear that in many ways it is developing-world
cities that are leading the ecological pack -- for the obvious
reason that theirs are the most pressing problems.

Consider Mexico City, one of only two cities in the world with
air quality worse than Jakarta. As in Jakarta, buses and old
taxis are major polluters. So Mexico City's response has been
straightforward: It plans to replace 80,000 of its oldest taxis
by the end of 2006. It will offer $1,300 towards the price of
each replacement, with the owner paying the price difference for
a new, lower-emissions vehicle. In Santiago, Chile, the city
government has introduced a system of competitive tendering for
firms wishing to operate bus services into the city centre. Only
firms with modern, low-emission buses are able to win access to
such routes.

With the 2008 Olympic games approaching, Beijing is adopting a
range of measures to spruce up the city. By 2008, 43 percent of
the city's total land area will be devoted to trees and
vegetation: That's more than most Western cities and four times
more than Jakarta currently possesses. By next year, 90 percent
of public buses will run on clean fuels, and all of the city's
coal-fired boilers will have been retrofitted to use natural gas.

Meanwhile, Shanghai is moving forward with its "100,000 Roofs"
project, in which solar panels fitted to private houses and
offices will be used to generate 430 million kilowatt-hours of
electricity each year -- enough to supply the entire city for two
days without any associated pollution.

These cities are no strangers to rapid economic growth, nor to
the social and housing issues that come with it. But they have
all realized that a healthy environment and a sustainable
consumption model are preconditions to economic prosperity, not
antithetical to it. Let's hope that the Jakarta authorities
realize this before it is too late.

The writer is a British freelance writer based in Jakarta.