Jakarta’s latest flood struck in January
2013. Across the capital, 15,000 people were displaced. Transportation,
power and other essential services were disrupted. Damage to
infrastructure and property was substantial.
Normally it
is the poor that is hit the hardest, but this time the rich felt it too.
This flood brought this fully into focus, as it was the first to inundate
and close the city’s Central Business District.
Factory
assets were also destroyed, impacting profits and livelihoods;
transportation disruptions prevented workers from getting to work and
products to market.
Surely now
there is a need to find common ground between the government and
businesses to make long-term plans concerning mutual growth and
prosperity, investing in protecting against weather-related disasters
that will likely worsen in frequency and severity as climate impacts
accrue.
Forward-thinking
businesses will have the ability to influence the government to invest in
the development of climate resilience, finding mutual ground support of
necessary protective measures from which both rich and poor will benefit.
The need is
obvious and the window of opportunity to act is now.
Flooding in
the capital is becoming more frequent and extreme. There are multiple
causes, including deforestation in the Puncak hills feeding the rivers
flowing through the city, farmland conversion to peri-urban and urban
residential and commercial use and land subsidence in the city of several
centimeters a year.
Climate
change will increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather
events and in addition will bring the added challenge of rising sea
levels.
With each
flood, the economic and social costs are growing. In social terms, the
poor feel the impacts disproportionately. Maps of Jakarta’s contours show
that the more low-lying and flood-prone areas are where low-income
housing and slums are more likely to be located.
Livelihoods
also suffered badly. Accurate figures for the number of poor affected (58
percent of Jakarta’s workforce is made up of manual laborers) is
difficult to calculate given a lack of information on the informal labor
sector, including micro and small enterprises run by street vendors and
home-based industry.
What is known
is that among the 500,000 street vendors in Jakarta and over 100,000
beneficiaries of micro enterprise financing facilities from the Koperasi
Jasa Keuangan cooperative, few have insurance. If flooding destroys their
assets, their economic plight and vulnerability become increasingly
serious.
As flood
frequency and severity increase, the better off are likely to also become
more vulnerable. If their assets are destroyed, they will be at risk of
entering into poverty themselves.
Impacts on
business and the economy affect rich and poor alike. The Finance Ministry
estimated it would boost the inflation rate by around 1 percent in
January alone. The Association of General Insurance Companies estimated
its members would have to pay claims of Rp 3 trillion (US$309 million).
This is 50 percent higher than the Rp 2.1 trillion in flood-related
claims in 2007, which was in turn greater than the Rp 1.5 trillion paid
out after the 2002 flood.
The high cost
of relief and recovery will adversely impact investment in infrastructure
and other development activities.
In addition,
to receive protection from flood damage, clients need to purchase
additional insurance coverage as in the commercial sector; most
properties must buy all-risk insurance — floods included — as required by
banks.
Mitigating
flooding in Jakarta requires comprehensive measures to avoid entirely
predictable impacts. A focus is need on long-term investment in safe and
inclusive flood defenses, yet investment rarely goes beyond disaster
response after flooding occurs.
Six days
after the flood, the Office of the Coordinating Economic Minister
launched a “Jakarta Coastal Defense Strategy” to alleviate flooding in
Jakarta.
The strategy
mainly focuses on structural mitigation financed by the central
government, provincial governments and potential investors. It remains to
be seen whether these efforts will be implemented and coordinated with
other relevant agencies’ responsibilities.
These include
the Environmental Management Agency, the Sanitation Agency and the Public
Housing Agency. Together they are responsible for the enforcement of
spatial planning, groundwater use restrictions, optimizing reservoirs,
optimizing riverbanks, redevelopment of settlements, waste management for
settlement along riverbanks and watershed conservation in the short,
medium and long term. Criticism, however, has been frequent over poor coordination
and implementation.
Two areas of
concern are raised going forward. The first concerns coordination of
complex, multiagency responses among institutions. The second concern is
over whom and what has priority in flood protection.
There is a danger
that “flood protection” will be used to expunge untenured communities
that have been the focus of land clearances in the past. For example, to
facilitate the drainage of the 13 rivers running through Jakarta, and
dredging all dams and canals, the Jakarta government proposed relocating
communities from flood-prone areas and squatters from the Ciliwung,
Pesanggrahan, Angke and Sunter riverbanks and embankments to affordable
apartments.
Housing,
though, is in short supply; out of the 3,500 families being moved, there
is a shortfall of 400.
It is clear
that rich and poor alike now have a recognized common interest in
Jakarta’s systems functioning, being resilient to challenges including
the predictable impacts of flooding.
As learned
from our lessons elsewhere in building Urban Climate Change Resilience in
Indonesia, it is clear that governance issues, and not technical capacity
gaps, are the biggest obstacles to developing urban resilience in
Jakarta.
There is a
clear need for a deepening of shared interest and learning between the
government, the private sector and civil society representatives.
Failure to
act could mean paralysis of urban systems in Jakarta when floods hit
again and ensue in hardship for all. ●
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