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.