Fidelis E. Satriastanti& Arientha Primanita, Jakarta – The collapses of a road and an embankment last week are characteristic of the Jakarta administration's failure to provide basic services for its residents and set a poor example for the rest of the country, an activist says.
A 103-meter, two-lane stretch of Jalan RE Martadinata fell into the Japat River last Thursday. While the cause of the collapse is still being determined, most experts have blamed it on subsidence or soil erosion around the base of the piles.
In the same week, a 115-meter stretch of new embankment along the West Flood Canal collapsed. That incident has been blamed on soil quality.
Slamet Daryoni, the head of urban environmental education at the Indonesian Green Institute, said on Wednesday that Jakarta was "destroying itself."
"Despite that, it is still held up as a reference by other cities, but we know the city has failed to protect its citizens, mainly through misguided policies and messed-up spatial planning," he said.
Such policies have led to severe environmental degradation that threatens to usher in a host of disasters, he said.
"If there's a decline in the quality of the environment, then we'll see more major disasters like Situ Gintung and Martadinata," Slamet said, referring to the Situ Gintung levee breach that killed 100 people in 2009.
He said a study by his organization showed that only 33 of the 226 lakes and reservoirs in the Greater Jakarta area were still in good condition.
Darrundono, an environmental and spatial planning expert at Jakarta's Tarumanegara University, said other threats came from climate change.
"Studies predict that because of global warming, the Jakarta coastline will have receded by 15 kilometers by 2020," he said. "In other words, you better start trading in your cars for speedboats."
Darrundono said the problems had never been so acute during the Dutch colonial era, during which time the administration dedicated 25 percent of the city's total area to green space. That figure is now 9.6 percent.
The administration has vowed that it will to push it up to 13.9 percent, although by law it must be 30 percent.
The Indonesian Green Institute says green space in the city was at a high of 28.8 percent in 1984 under then Governor Ali Sadikin, before falling drastically to just 6.2 percent in 2007, the final year of Governor Sutiyoso's 10-year term.
Darrundono said much of the lost green spaces were catchment areas for the city's 13 rivers that had been developed into housing estates, which had led to more problems. "The buildings extract the groundwater at high rates, resulting in land subsidence," he said.
The city uses 532 million cubic meters of groundwater a year, or 46 percent of known supplies, according to the Indonesian Green Institute, and it is replenished at a much slower rate. That exceeds the 40 percent limit recommended by experts and has been blamed for land subsidence of 17 to 26 centimeters a year.
"It's important that we turn these developed areas back into the catchment areas that they used to be," Darrundono said. "You can't just build houses in such areas."
Private households in Jakarta are prohibited from drawing groundwater, although many do so to avoid paying for piped water.
The administration is trying to get more people to connect to the mains supply, and has raised the rate for groundwater use by the 4,000 registered commercial and industrial users sixfold since last year in a bid to limit the amount extracted.