IN JUNE THISYEAR, ANEW PLAN FORJAKARTA’SOFFSHOREsea wall was approved in principle by the ministry of public
works, although it could be another 12 months before it gets
its final approval and work can finally start.
NCICD II is modest in scope compared to the Great Garuda,
but it is still vast, comprising of a single open dyke that
will run 40km across the bay of Jakarta, from the port at
Tanjung Priok in the east, to the Soekarno-Hatta airport in
the west. Lessons have been learned from NCICD I’s failure.
Gone are the reclaimed islands and the property develop-
ments, although a toll road will be built along the dyke in
order to help secure financing for the project. The outer dyke
is scheduled to begin construction in 2023.
“Reclamation is now off the table, and we’re back to flood
defence,” Coenen says. “We were always against merging
the economy and the flood defence in such a way that you
depended on economic development for your flood defence.
The Great Garuda was a real estate project, basically. But
real estate goes up and down. Real estate crashes. You haveJakarta, Steenfelt says. The sheer size of the challenge,
and the city’s historical failures to meaningfully tackle the
problem, mean that he is not hopeful.
“Jakarta is a sad story, and it’s very difficult to see how it
could be resolved, because of the timescale and the number
of people,” he says. “It’s a gigantic task. But you can’t
just close your eyes.”
Mungkasa is well aware of the scale of the problem, and
of the rapidly approaching deadlines. By his estimates, the
city needs to stop pumping groundwater entirely within five
years. It is an enormously ambitious target. “We have to be
confident that we can do it,” he says.
The alternative is unthinkable. “If this is not a success, if we
fail to do it, to reach our target, then there are two [plans]. Plan
B and Plan C. Plan B is we need to build another sea wall. The
second, of course, if the sea wall still doesn’t work, we have
to move the people... to move people is really unbelievable.”
His first job is to rationalise the ways in which Jakarta
has managed, or mismanaged, its water supplies. The city’s
administration is as tangled and chaotic as the city it serves,
with dozens of overlapping ministries, agencies, parastatal
companies and private contractors all working on ostensibly
similar missions, but often not talking to one another. In
sanitation alone, Mungkasa says, there are three agencies
that share responsibility for managing sewage, which will
occasionally duplicate each other’s work in some areas while
collectively neglecting others.
Even where there are laws governing how water should be
treated and recycled, enforcement is poor. An estimated half a
million people have no access at all to sanitation, and defecate
straight into the water courses. The company responsible
for wastewater treatment for the city says it covers around
11 per cent of the total area of the city; Mungkasa insists the
reality is closer to five per cent.
“I think this [lack of co-ordination] happens in every city
in developing countries,” Mungkasa says. “But in Jakarta
it is really killing us.”
Mungkasa and his small “resilience secretariat” – a group
of three young urban experts in a windowless room in an
annex of city hall – are putting together a new “master plan”
for the water sector, which will be unveiled later this year. It
is likely to advise more regulation or taxes on groundwater
extraction, and to encourage public sector organisations to lead
by example; currently even ministries tasked with fixing the
problem of flooding are themselves pumping out groundwater.
Cleaning the rivers will be a huge challenge. As well as
human waste, most of the 13 rivers have been contaminated
with industrial chemicals, including heavy metals, and it could
take years just to stop the ongoing pollution. In the meantime,
the city will need to expand its use of rainwater harvesting and
other emerging water collection and purification technologies.
Property developers are being encouraged to build ponds
and reservoirs into their designs in order to store rainwater,
and to switch to vertical drainage, pumping used water down
into the earth rather than letting it flow back into the rivers.
Mungkasa – who has a politician’s gift for making out that
intractable problems have simple solutions – says that he has
no doubt this master plan will work. “If we provide people
with water, we will stop the subsidence,” he says.
Few experts would question that, but many are skeptical
about whether the measures can be taken in time – if at all.
“It could work,” says Deltares’ Peter Letitre. “It depends on
the sense of urgency... we don’t think it’s impossible.”11-19-FTJakarta.indd 104 13/08/2019 15:12