The first thing that strikes you in Jakarta is the traffic: Motorbikes, cars and rusted minibuses flock day and night through the streets of this messy Indonesian metropolis. Traveling across Jakarta, even short distances, could mean spending hours in nearly unbreathable air.
The second thing that strikes is the lack of sewage and wastewater treatment systems. Ditches exposed and covered run along the roadside, collecting waste from homes, offices and industry before pouring into waterways across the city. When wastewater reaches the coast, it is black and polluted. A dreadful odor envelops slums like Muara Angke, a coastal community of poor fishing families who build their shacks on the waste from the processing of mussels.
Greater Jakarta is a delta city of more than 10 million people, crossed by 13 rivers and hundreds of canals. It is estimated that about 2 million people commute daily to downtown Jakarta from the suburbs. The metropolitan area is the second largest megacity in the world (after Tokyo-Yokohama), home to an estimated 28 million people and comprising the satellite cities of Tangerang, Depok, Bekasi and Bogor. Data shows that Jakarta’s population grew by 34.6 percent between 2000 and 2010, ranking it among the top 10 of the world’s fastest growing megacities.
Together with pollution and population growth, climate change poses a threat to Jakarta and its people. In an August study published in the journal Nature, scientists write that Jakarta is one of the globe’s most vulnerable cities in terms of flooding.
Coastline areas like Muara Angke, Pluit and Tanjung Priok regularly suffer from seasonal floods, monthly high tides and rising sea levels. Mainly composed of slums, these areas lack protection against high water or floods. Jakarta once benefitted from the natural protection of mangrove forests around its borders, but these are long gone. As recently as 1998, mangroves occupied 44,000 hectares in Jakarta, West Java and Banten. By 2009, they had been reduced to just more than 11,000 hectares.
Today only 300 hectares of forest remain in Jakarta itself, and these face continual threats from pollutants and garbage. Moreover, slums now surround the northward reservoirs, which are supposed to receive water flooding from rivers and canals. In fact, slums are replacing the role of mangroves, as they act as a sort of urban, inhabited buffer to the floods. Locals are getting used to have their shelters inundated.
According to a 2009 study, the number of residents living in poverty counts around 340,000. This is a conservative figure, though, as more than 20 percent of Jakarta settlements are slums, and there is a large share of undocumented immigrants. The number of poor people, then, might reach well beyond that official number. The poor usually work in informal sectors as drivers, scavengers, navvies and so on.
Slum areas occupy chiefly riverbanks, like those on the Ciliwung. Shanties weaken the riverbanks and their inhabitants live with inadequate infrastructure, unhealthy surroundings and low accessibility to basic needs. They use the river water not only for sewage but also for bathing and washing clothes. Due to illegal residential development, the Ciliwung has no overflow basins. Flood enters directly into houses on its banks.
Gallery: Jakarta Sinking
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A woman and her daughter stand in highly polluted seawater in the Muara Angke slum, north Jakarta. This district, one of the poorest in the city, is home to fishing families whose shacks stand on garbage and sewage arriving from Jakarta’s waterways.
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Boys playing with pigeons in Muara Angke. In the background, new luxury buildings under construction stand in the development coastal area of Pantai Mutiara.
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A sign advertising new luxury housing in the Kapuk district. The choice to change the use of shallow coastal zones, in order to meet demand from a growing population, will deeply affect tides and accelerate subsidence in this part of the town.
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A monkey looks for food among garbage inside “Hutan Wisata Kamal Muara,” one of the few areas of mangrove forests left in Jakarta. This area is part of the city’s 330-acre mangrove green belt, which is highly polluted by waste coming down from rivers and canals.
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View of the Pluit reservoir from inside a social housing complex, used as temporary shelter for people living in surrounding slums that have flooded.
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A woman bathing in the heavy rains of January 2013. The poor Pluit district has flooded as a result of rainfall, tidal waves and a lack of natural coastal protection.
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The Pluit district, one of the most crowded slums in north Jakarta, flooded in January 2013. Waters reached up to two meters high at the emergency peak.
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An Indonesian Red Cross vehicle, carrying medicine for distribution in temporary shelters and escorted by navy soldiers in the Pluit district, January 2013.
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A woman and her baby line up for medicine from the Indonesian Red Cross in January 2013.
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Women from the Kapuk-Muara district, north Jakarta, line up for clean water distributed by the Indonesian Red Cross. The supply of drinking water caused a major emergency during the flood, resulting in the spread of gastrointestinal infections, especially in children.
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A family living inside one of the Pluit district’s temporary shelters, a former elementary school.
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A worker under the bridge in the Rawajati district shows the height of the Ciliwung River during the flood of January 2013.
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A man restores his damaged house on the banks of Ciliwung River, in the Pasar Minggu district. In the reflection, a woman rests with children.
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Maria, age 30, in her bedroom with her 15-day-old son in Rawajati district along the Ciliwung River. During the floods, her house was fully inundated by water and mud.
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Ruins of a small house in the Pasar Minggu district. Mud and garbage still cover the floor and walls a month after the floods.
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A woman bathing in the highly polluted waters of the Ciliwung River. Continuing disposal of any kind of solid and domestic waste into rivers, and illegal development of housing on their banks, obstructs the flowing of waters and exasperates seasonal floods.
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People taking pictures close to a bridge on the Ciliwung River inside Bogor Botanical Garden. Before arriving in Jakarta, the Cliwung River runs down from the mountains south to Bogor.
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View of the Katulampa neighborhood in Bogor, along a canal deriving from the Ciliwung River, downstream of the sluice.
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Kids playing with an old tire in the waters of the Katulampa Canal.
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A man sieving the sediments of Ciliwung River, just upstream of the Katulampa sluice, in search for fine sands. He will sell the sand as construction material.
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A man carries a bag of fine sand dug from the bed of Ciliwung River. Unregulated sand mining can damage the river and weaken its banks.
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View of tea fields in Cisarua, on the way up to Puncak, Bogor. The growing reclamation of lands for farming has led to deforestation on the hills and mountains, which reduces Jakarta’s catchment basin.
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A tea picker inside one of Cisaura’s tea fields.
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After harvesting tea leaves in Cijeruk, on the slopes of Mount Salak, a family loads them onto a van that will carry them to a factory for drying.
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One of the golf courts inside Rancamaya Golf Estate, a 700-hectare area of new luxury houses at the foot of Mount Salak.
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Cijeruk’s waterfalls on the slopes of Mount Salak, which are inside an area of preserved primary forest. Dense trees on mountain forests provide protection against flood. A number of field surveys show a decline in tree density in the mountains south of Jakarta, thus reducing their capability to mitigate water runoff.
All photos by Elisabetta Zavoli
A typical modern and fast-growing Asian city, Jakarta is a place of contrasts. No more than a crumbling wall might separate glassy luxury apartments from informal settlements. Elite and basic housing stand side by side. Indonesia is Southeast Asia’s largest economy, with a growth of 6.5 percent in 2011. Jakarta is the biggest economic hub of the country, counting alone for 7 percent of the Indonesian GDP. Most of the new housing supply is targeted to the rich. Gated communities and high-rise apartments contribute to widening social segregation.
Over the years, policymakers have responded to increasing demand by converting green space and wetlands into housing, commercial and industrial uses. In 1965, green areas still covered more than 35 percent of the total city area; today, they only cover 9.3 percent. This, despite a national law mandating that provinces have green space covering 30 percent of their land.
The more Jakarta grows upward, the more it sinks because of land subsidence. Chaotic high-density development also contributes to the overuse of ground water for both household and industrial purposes. As underground seawater intrusion increases in and around the city, it is foreseen that in 10 to 15 years Jakarta will face groundwater scarcity.
Currently, the Jakarta Capital City Government doesn’t have a policy specifically tailored to climate change, though it does have policies on disaster mitigation. After floods this past January, which killed 26, displaced 100,000 more and caused 4.3 trillion Indonesian Rupees in damages, the government has begun to clear illegal settlements on riverbanks and around the north reservoirs, moving people to new popular housing.
But this is far from a permanent solution. As written in the Nature study, “failing to adapt is not a viable option in coastal cities. The estimated adaptation costs are far below the estimate of aggregate damage losses per year, in the absence of adaptation.” How Indonesians will cope with the many challenges facing their capital city is still an open question.
Elisabetta Zavoli is an Italian photojournalist based in Jakarta, where her work primarily focuses on environmental and social issues connected with climate change. She has been published in the Financial Times (UK), The National (Abu Dhabi), Repubblica (IT), Wired (IT), WirtschaftsWoche (Germany) and other publications.
Text edited by Jacopo Pasotti
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