64 Asia The EconomistSeptember 21st 2019
2 cent of Jakarta is now below sea level. This
means that water in the drainage system
that would otherwise empty into the bay
remains trapped in the city. And as Jakarta
sinks, it is dragging its dykes down with it.
Building the plants and pipes to supply
treated water is expensive and time-con-
suming, however, and the result is hidden
out of sight. The ncicdplan, in contrast,
would have sculpted 1,000 hectares of re-
claimed land into a new waterfront city in
the shape of a garuda, a mythical bird that
is the symbol of Indonesia. “By developing
North Jakarta, the project promises to [ful-
fil] the world-class city aspirations of Indo-
nesia’s political elites,” writes Emma Col-
ven of the University of Oklahoma. “People
want to see visible infrastructure,” says Sri-
nivasan Ancha of the adb.
In August the government signalled a
change of tack. It announced plans to clean
Jakarta’s public water supply and connect
the entire city to it in an effort to stop
groundwater extraction. The ncicdplan
has also been revised. The sea wall will no
longer enclose the bay, and the artificial is-
lands have been scrapped, although 2,000
hectares of land will still be reclaimed for
development. The cost has fallen by half.
Jakarta is not the only Asian city to get
cold feet about big engineering schemes in
recent years, and to embrace cheaper flood-
control measures. The most notable con-
vert is Singapore, which is no stranger to
monumental waterworks. It recently com-
pleted a vast underground retention pond
at a cost of S$227m ($164m), a cathedral of
concrete buttresses fed and drained by
pipes you could drive a car through. The
city is so proud of Marina Barrage, a system
of huge pumps and nine 27-metre-long hy-
draulic gates to stop the business district
flooding, that it has turned the S$226m fa-
cility into a tourist attraction. Over the past
decade it has spent a total of S$2.4bn on
drains. Yet as the tiny city-state runs out of
space for colossal new structures, and as
ever more torrential storms threaten to
overwhelm even the new, improved drain-
age network, Singapore has had to rethink
the way it manages storm water.
In 2006 Singapore launched a scheme
to increase the city’s absorption capacity by
natural means, by converting canals and
reservoirs into streams and lakes and by
creating wetlands and other spaces de-
signed to flood. Swamps, after all, can ab-
sorb potentially ruinous floods, while
mangrove forests can protect cities near
the coast from storm surges. Maintaining
them is much cheaper than building dykes.
Singapore completed 75 projects to mimic
such natural flood defences between 2010
and 2018. The scheme, which also helps to
harvest rainwater, is the first of its kind in
the tropics. But the rest of Asia, with far less
to spend on colossal flood defences, will
surely follow suit. 7T
he amazonis not the world’s only
smouldering rainforest, alas: fires are
also raging in the jungles of Indonesia,
blanketing much of South-East Asia in
thick smoke. Some 3,300 square kilo-
metres on the islands of Sumatra and
Borneo have gone up in flames. The
government has deployed more than
9,000 people and 52 aircraft to fight the
fires. Indonesia and neighbouring Ma-
laysia are also trying to quench the
flames and clear the haze they produce
by seeding clouds. But containing the
infernos is even harder than usual be-
cause of dry weather, which has become
more common as the climate changes.
The haze is thought to have caused
more than 200,000 respiratory infec-
tions and has prompted more than 1,500
schools in Malaysia alone to close. The
smoke has been thick enough to disrupt
air traffic. The president of Indonesia,
Joko Widodo, says he is praying for rain.
Indonesia’s environment and forestry
ministry says most of the fires were lit
deliberately. In one district, according to
Doni Monardo of the National Disaster
Mitigation Agency, 80% of the fires
appear to be intended to convert forest
into palm-oil plantations. In theory,
using fire to do this is illegal, but the
local officials who should stop it are
easily bought off. The alternative—clear-
felling the often swampy forest and
disposing of the resulting waste—is
expensive. Preparing land for planta-
tions without using fire costs around
$300-400 a hectare, says Herry Purnomo
of the Centre for International Forestry
Research, which is based in Indonesia,whereasburning costs $30.
The fires are particularly difficult to
extinguish because many of them are in
peat forests. These are swampy jungles
where vegetation that falls to the ground
does not completely decay because of the
waterlogged soil. When peat becomes
dry enough to burn, it can continue to
combust underground long after the
trees on the surface have been doused.
The resulting deforestation is especially
harmful to the climate, since peatlands
store as much as ten times more carbon
per hectare than other forests.
Since he was first elected in 2014, Mr
Widodo, better known as Jokowi, has
sought to stamp out the flames (there
was another bad year in 2015, although
forest-clearing fires are a feature of every
dry season). In 2017 the forestry ministry
launched a masterplan for protecting
peatlands and preventing fires. The next
year a national land-use map was re-
leased, making it easier for the authori-
ties to establish land ownership and
prosecute those responsible for fires.
Jokowi’s government has come down
relatively hard on the culprits. After the
fires of 2015, police arrested 660 people.
So far the authorities have arrested 200
people and are investigating some 370
companies in connection with the cur-
rent fires. By contrast, only 40 or so were
arrested under Jokowi’s predecessor,
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Fires are
often started just outside palm-oil con-
cessions to obscure responsibility. But
the government could be tougher: as of
February, some $220m in fines owed by
plantation companies involved in past
fires remained unpaid. They, at least,
should be made to feel the burn.Gaspingforair
Haze in South-East AsiaSINGAPORE
Burning forests blacken skies