It is no coincidence that when I wake up in the morning with a bad headache, thick smog prevents me from seeing Jakarta’s Monas Square or the Indian Ocean.
The polluted haze never completely goes away, but usually I can make out both the Indonesian capital’s National Monument and Jakarta Bay without too much trouble from the balcony of my apartment. Sometimes, even the Puncak Hills far to the south of the city and some of the Thousand Islands to the north are clearly visible, although that's rare.
Measures have been proposed to deal with the problem, including a costly plan to move the capital out of Jakarta. Unfortunately, while another simpler and cheaper solution would be the most effective, it is also politically the most costly and complicated.
Jakarta, of course, is hardly the only city in the world with an air pollution problem, but it often occupies a place in the top ranks. On July 25, 2018, for instance, it had the highest air quality index (AQI) rating in the world: 186, which put it in the upper range of the red zone, meaning “unhealthy”. Usually, it is never quite that bad, but it is rarely good. Last April, the AQI only once dropped below 70 and was more often orange and red, climbing to 159 in the first week.
That means on that day Jakarta’s 9 million or so inhabitants were inhaling a worrying amount of small particles, specifically the 70.5 micrograms of fine particulate matter that was in every cubic meter of air. Those particles can easily damage the lungs by causing cancer, asthma and other respiratory diseases, but they can also lead to pregnancy complications and, in general, heart problems and premature death. The more PM2.5 in the atmosphere, the higher the risk.
In India, many cities of which regularly rank among the top 20 most polluted in the world – in fact, an estimated 1.24 million Indian citizens have been killed by toxic air since 2017 – urban smog has become a major issue for all three of the main political parties in the ongoing general election. In contrast, the situation was barely mentioned in Indonesia’s recent presidential and legislative campaigns. Even when the two candidates for president – incumbent Joko Widodo and challenger Prabowo Subianto – were to discuss the environment during their second face-to-face debate in February, neither one mentioned chronic smog. The nearest they got was when they talked about the seasonal pollution caused by forest fires, with Jokowi claiming he had eliminated the problem.
The forest fires – as polluting as they are – do not have much to do with Jakarta’s chronic smog. Rather, that comes from several other sources, like the many factories in the area, the city’s coal-fired power plants, the residents who often burn household garbage in their yards and on the streets and, most importantly, from more than 4.4 million cars and 13 million motorcycles. It doesn’t help that the gasoline sold and used in Indonesia is about the dirtiest in the world: Not only is it high in sulfur, but it still contains lead.
Meanwhile, some citizens of Jakarta have taken steps to make the politicians – at least the ones at City Hall, particularly Governor Anies Baswedan – pay much more attention to the problem. In December last year a coalition called the Clean Air Initiative threatened to sue the city administration if nothing was done to lower the pollution levels. They announced an ultimatum, giving Baswedan a 60-day deadline, which has since passed with no apparent response – not a direct one, at least.
It is unclear what the city government alone could do to cut pollution levels in Jakarta, except to offer a few carrots to convince commuters to use public transit. It has participated in the construction of two new rail systems, a Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) and a Light Rail Transit (LRT), and it has started testing electric buses for the Transjakarta fleet. Those efforts, as laudable and necessary as they are, are not enough on their own. The city needs help from the national government.
Recently, newly re-elected President Jokowi resurrected an old idea to move the seat of government away from Jakarta to a less-populated island, in part to reduce Jakarta’s traffic congestion and smog. However, many experts in the field are casting doubt on whether removing all government offices and civil servants from one city and creating another for them elsewhere would do much more than spread the problem out a little bit. Jakarta would still be stuffed full of people and cars, on the one hand, and previously green areas would be paved over at a new location, on the other.
A demonstrably more effective solution would be quite easy technically, but almost impossible politically: The central government could use a stick to complement the city’s carrot in the form of discouraging the use of private vehicles by raising the extraordinarily low cost of fuel. With the mean price of gasoline below 75 US cents per liter, it is less than half the global average. That cutting the number of vehicles on the streets works is easy to prove: On May 1, a national holiday when most people stayed at home, Jakarta’s AQI rating dropped to a rare 42, putting it in the “good” green zone for the first time in months.
Unfortunately, few issues in Indonesia are as dangerous to a politician’s longevity as the price of petrol. Every increase is met with public unrest that often escalates. Today’s democratically elected politicians have not forgotten that fuel price riots played a big part in bringing down the autocratic rule of Indonesia’s second president, Suharto, who previously appeared firmly entrenched in power. If he was made vulnerable, those dependent on votes must be thinking, what hope have they to withstand public wrath? That could explain why the state oil company took the retrograde step of lowering fuel prices just two months before the election.
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