Jakarta faces perils of warming, inaction

By Laurie Goering | Tribune foreign correspondent

December 9, 2007, Chicagotribune.com

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Thousands of climate change experts from throughout the world are gathering in Bali to start the politically tortuous process of turning new scientific evidence about the perils of climate change into policy to act on the problem.

To see the potential perils of inaction, they need not look far.

Indonesia's low-lying capital, Jakarta, has long suffered seasonal flooding. But climate change, combined with a failure by politicians to address factors contributing to flooding, means a fifth of the fast-growing Asian city of 9 million may be perpetually flooded by 2050, Indonesian officials believe.

Unless major, concerted action is taken, the international airport will be surrounded by water and accessible only by boat, and the city's densest slums will be submerged, as will some of its most exclusive luxury housing developments, said Rachmat Witoelar, Indonesia's environment minister, who opened the two-week climate meeting in Bali, an Indonesian island.

Witoelar envisions a future in which the richest Jakartans live in high-rise apartment buildings connected by boat and elevated highways to high-rise malls, factories and offices.

Where the legions of poor will live, no one is quite sure.

"Climate change here is happening now. Yesterday in fact," Witoelar said. "We're very vulnerable."

Just how vulnerable became evident in February, when record floodwaters swamped the city, killing 80 people and driving half a million from their homes.

What makes Jakarta's impending disaster particularly worrisome—and a potential lesson to other places confronted with climate change—is that officials of this city, which has a long history of corruption and public mismanagement, are doing very little to address it.

Lack of realistic policy and planning to address flooding increasingly appears to be as big a threat as climate change itself, and may ultimately leave Jakarta with just three options: Float, sink or move.

"If sea level rises and the intense rains come more, Jakarta will drown, and we will have to think of relocating the capital," said Andi Sudirman, a hydrologist who has spent 20 years coordinating a river monitoring station in the hills above Jakarta.

A study released this year by the International Institute for Environment and Development in London similarly suggests that protecting cities like Jakarta from rising sea and floodwaters might prove so expensive that relocating people—perhaps even whole cities—could be a better choice.

Forty percent of Jakarta, built on a vast flood plain divided by 13 rivers, lies below sea level. In the best of times, the ocean's waves are held back by a system of pumps and floodgates. In the rainy season, downpours regularly overwhelm the city's drainage system, flooding the streets and sending muddy water pouring over the banks of its rivers and canals.

More rain, mismanagement

Cllimate change is making things worse. Rainstorms in Jakarta and its watershed are growing more intense and erratic, making flooding more severe and harder to predict.

Jakarta residents have long kept a wary eye on rumbling gray skies during the rainy seasons, which start in December. But in February, no one was prepared for a rainstorm so intense it sent floodwaters surging over 60 percent of the city.

With too few shelters available, families slept under interstate bridges and on graves in the cemetery. Hospitals were overwhelmed with cases of diarrhea, respiratory infection and leptospirosis, a bacterial disease caused by exposure to water contaminated with animal urine. Phone service, power, roads and rail lines were cut for days. Financial losses were put at nearly a half-billion dollars.

Sutiyoso, the city's governor, an unpopular and unelected ex-general appointed to his job by former Indonesian dictator Suharto, dismissed criticism of the city's lack of flood preparations, calling the deluge a "natural phenomenon."

But The Jakarta Post, in a frank editorial, laid the blame for the February disaster directly on him and other city officials, calling it "simply unforgivable" for the governor to "leave citizens helpless."

Jakarta's growing flooding problems are largely the result of local government mismanagement, critics say. Trash and sediment clog rivers that are rarely dredged. Forests have been felled and reservoirs bulldozed in the city's watershed to make way for homes. Business owners and residents have illegally filled in parts of the city's rivers. And since the late 1990s the city has seen a construction boom, much of it on former wetlands.

The city's planning guidelines call for maintaining wetlands and green space, but such areas have shrunk from 26 percent of the city in 1985 to 9 percent today. All but 9 percent of the original forest in the hills above Jakarta, which once absorbed much of the runoff flooding the city, has been cut by developers, according to the national public works department.

The problem, nearly everyone admits, is widespread corruption among city and state officials and lack of enforcement of Jakarta's laws.

"Corruption is the root of all of this flooding," said Slamet Daryoni, the executive director of Wahli, an Indonesian environmental and social justice non-profit organization. "The Jakarta development model is not to minimize flooding but to maximize profits."

He points out a spot on the Krukut River in West Jakarta, where developers building an apartment complex have sunk a huge concrete wall two-thirds of the way out into the 30-foot-wide river, then tamped in dirt behind to enlarge their plot. The normally placid stream now races in a whitewater torrent through the bottleneck; just across the river, on lower ground, sits the city's main telephone switching complex.

Siswoko, a flood-control specialist and director general of water resources for the national Ministry of Public Works, shakes his head at such violations, which have somehow received legal permits.

"Even if we have the regulation, local government doesn't follow it," he said.

Developers aren't the only ones filling in Jakarta's rivers. In a city with few open dumps and little in the way of waste collection, 70 percent of residential trash ends up in rivers and canals, Daryoni said. The garbage, combined with sediment from upstream erosion, has blocked most of the city's drains and filled its once-deep rivers and canals.

No place else for trash

At a floodgate station in central Jakarta built nearly a century ago during Dutch colonial rule, workers each day use a mammoth excavator to claw garbage bags, old inner tubes, bits of broken bamboo and heaps of plastic grocery bags from a massive drift of refuse trapped against the floodgates.

On a normal day, workers pull out enough garbage to fill five 20-ton trucks, said Pardjono, the manager of the station; when the water flow rises, as many as 15 trucks are needed each day.

National and city officials have promised to ease the city's problem by pushing through a long-delayed new drainage canal and moving 71,000 slum dwellers away from the banks of Ciliwung, the city's largest river, in order to widen it.

But with land costs spectacularly high in Jakarta and more than 100,000 riverside families in need of new apartments elsewhere "we'll need 25 years to build them all," said H. Wishnu Subagio, head of public works for Jakarta. Buying land for the drainage canal will similarly be a challenge.

Agus Purnomo, a climate change specialist in Indonesia's Environment Ministry, predicts that within 40 years seafront North Jakarta—full of multimillion-dollar homes and middle-class districts—will be abandoned.

"The problem with climate change is it's very long term," he said. "You can mobilize for something sudden, like a tsunami. With climate change, the adaptation is gradual," he said.