Circle of Blue
  • Podcasts
  • Great Lakes
    • Fresh
    • Harmful Algal Blooms
    • Water’s True Cost
    • Michigan’s Groundwater Emergency
  • Drying American West
  • Water Debt
  • WASH
  • WaterNews
    • WaterNews
      • The Daily Stream
      • Federal Water Tap
      • Fresh
      • Weekly Water Newsletter
      • HotSpots H2O
      • Special Reports
        • Water, Texas
        • Tapped Out
        • Legionnaires’
        • Fair Bluff
        • After Paradise Burned
        • Water Pricing
        • Water Affordability
        • Water Scarcity in India
        • Groundwater
        • Delhi Waits For Water
      • Convenings
  • Features
    •  
      • The Biggest Dry: Arizona
      • Nebraska Nitrate Contamination
      • Lake Mead
      • Water and Financial Risks
      • California Drought
      • Septic Infrastructure in the U.S.
      • Stranded Assets
      • Cape Town
      • Flint Water Crisis
      • Australia
      • Hidden Waters, Dragons in the Deep
      • Himalayas
      • Designing Waters Future
      • Zeropolis
        • Big Cities, Little Water
      • Water and Climate
      • Unearthing Water Risks of The Global Mining Industry
      • Chennai
  • Choke Point
    • The World at a Choke Point
      • Choke Point: Australia
      • Choke Point: Tamil Nadu
      • Choke Point: South Africa
      • Choke Point: China
      • Choke Point: India
      • Choke Point: Australia
      • Choke Point: Tehuacán Valley
      • Choke Point: U.S.
        • Choke Point: Index
          • California Central Valley
          • Great Lakes Algae
          • Ogallala Aquifer
          • Water Data
  • About
    • Fellowship
    • About Circle of Blue
    • Team Members
    • We’re Hiring
    • Board of Directors
    • Ethics and Sponsorship
    • Internships
    • Underwriters
    • Contact Us
  • Donate
  • Search
  • Menu Menu

A Sinking Metropolis

A day in the life of Jakarta—a city drowning in water insecurity.

By J. Carl Ganter and Jennifer Möller-Gulland

Ujang heaves his dilapidated wooden cart up the rough street through an afternoon downpour. The irony isn’t lost on him: While drenched to the skin, he’s delivering water to thirsty homes and bodegas in the slums of North Jakarta.

It takes every bit of his muscle to push the cart—and its nearly 1,000 pounds of water in blue plastic buckets—over a rise in the broken pavement.

Ujang stops in front of a food stand, wipes the rain and sweat from his eyes, and hefts two of the containers to the sidewalk. Parina, the restaurant’s owner, has been waiting anxiously. It’s lunchtime, and without water, her kitchen grinds to a halt.

Parina, 46, is among the nearly 5 million Jakarta residents who rely on water deliveries daily. As a single mother of three children, she counted as luck that one of her neighbors had enough money to drill a small, undocumented well that now supplies about 100 members of her community for $14 a month.

But the makeshift well’s water has become oily. Last year she began to supplement her supply by paying $25 each month to Ujang to deliver 6,000 liters of water for drinking and cooking. In all, she pays him about 10 percent of her monthly income.

The water comes today, but Parina, her family, and her business are on the point of a precarious spiral for this city of some 10.5 million people: Jakarta is sinking, many neighborhoods are below sea level and battling floods, its groundwater sources are becoming harder to reach and more contaminated, and its rivers are fouled with garbage and raw sewage.

The day after we visited Parina’s neighborhood in May, president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo re-confirmed his intention to move Indonesia’s capital out of Jakarta. Politicians have threatened to move the nation’s government elsewhere before, and they had plenty of reasons, from interminable traffic jams and air pollution, to a thin concrete wall that holds back the rising seas from inundating the city.

“Imagine a black swan event: a crack, a breakdown of the seawall in 10 to 20 years,” says Abedalrazq F. Khalil, a senior water resource management specialist of the World Bank Water Global Practice, based in Singapore. “By then subsidence would have sunk the city another meter. The resulting inundation would reach deep into the city. As a rough estimate, you would have three to four million people exposed to a three-meter wall of sea water. The impact on life and economy would be devastating.”

Only a few blocks away from Parina’s shop, Toyib taps on the ceramic tiles of his sparse home. He lifts a lid in his floor to show us his shallow well and the open-pit septic tank that is only three meters away. He’s head of the neighborhood and has access to the public water supply, but to save on his water bill, he uses this water from his own well for cleaning, washing clothes, and bathing.

Many of the city’s poor neighborhoods like this one in North Jakarta have sewage tanks that are open in the bottom, letting the putrid liquid flow directly into the vulnerable aquifers below, and back into informal water wells like his. “Everyone has a septic tank designed to leak,” he said.

Driven either by lack of reliable water supplies from the utilities, or by the cost savings from these individual wells, the unregulated pumping is causing land subsidence and making Jakarta one of the world’s fastest sinking cities.

“One can’t reverse subsidence,” observes Khalil of the World Bank. “You can’t stabilize or slow it down. Experience from other cities show that it takes 10 to 20 years after all groundwater abstraction has been stopped for subsidence to stabilize. Actions are urgent and can’t be further delayed.”

With only 4 percent of Jakartans connected to the sewage network—the second lowest coverage of a capital in Southeast Asia—the majority of households like Toyib’s depend on pit latrines and makeshift septic tanks for sanitation.

In many parts of the world, microloans make getting water to homes affordable. In North Jakarta, water.org and others are using microcredit loans to make it affordable for residents to haul contaminated water away.

BMT Bus (Bina Ummat Sejahtera) is partially financed by water.org and offers small loans to empty overflowing septic tanks and install new ones.

“Credits are mostly taken to empty septic tanks which were blocked and thus overflowed – especially in the rainy season,” said Esti, a manager of BMT BUS North Jakarta and its water, sanitation and hygiene team. “Some families haven’t emptied their septic tanks in 20 years.”

“There is no good solution for sanitation at the moment—we can only encourage people to get good and sealed septic tanks,” said Don Johnston of water.org. But even if there was a good answer for sanitation, homes and businesses would still have to discharge their graywater from cooking and cleaning directly into the city’s many small canals that flow reeking into the rivers and on to Jakarta Bay.

But even if the sewage and graywater stopped flowing tomorrow, the canals and rivers would still swell with garbage, said Professor Yusli Wardiatno of the IPB University in Bogor, who studies the effects of plastics in ecosystems and fisheries. “In the rainy season, you can see mattresses and refrigerators floating by.”

We stand in the shade of mangroves in the Muara Angke Wildlife Refugee and watch mats of plastic refuse drift down the river. The garbage accumulates along the banks of Jakarta’s 13 rivers. Professor Wardiatno scrapes at the mud, pointing to multicolored bits of plastic that reach up to three meters deep into the soil.

Oswar Mungkasa, Deputy Governor of Jakarta for Spatial Planning and Environment, is happy to meet in his downtown Jakarta office to talk about Jakarta’s water future. He is hopeful, but solving Jakartas’s profound water challenges could take years in the face of palpable urgency. If only the city could unite to clean the rivers and manage its sewage, he says, Jakarta could have a better prognosis.

“We are well aware of the potential the rivers have to address the vicious circle of over abstracting groundwater and consequent land subsidence—but cleaning the rivers is an immense challenge with many actors involved,” he said.

Bambang Harymurti, former editor in chief of Tempo, Indonesia’s leading weekly magazine, has spent his career writing about politics, human rights, and environmental justice and believes that Jakarta’s water story is the one that will define its future.

“There is hope, though,” he said. He points to Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, where the mayor has successfully managed to deliver on a promise of 100-percent piped water coverage to its residents and where the rivers are increasingly becoming cleaner. “Responsibility now lies with Jakarta to learn from Surabaya and take action quickly.”

Back in North Jakarta, dusk settles over Lake Pluit and the light breeze barely causes a ripple over the dark water, thick with sludge. The nearby pumping station, with lights burning yellow against the night, is the rampart. The grey pumps inside, three times taller than the men who tend them, push the black, untreated wastewater up and over the thin levee that holds back the sea.

J. Carl Ganter (@circleofblue) is co-founder and managing director of Circle of Blue and Vector Center, which report on global resource issues, particularly the competition between water, food, and energy in a changing climate. He is a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Award and served as vice-chairman of the Global Agenda Council on Water Security at the World Economic Forum.

All photos © by J. Carl Ganter/circleofblue.org.

Related

Recent Posts

  • Road Salt, A Stealthy Pollutant, Is Damaging Michigan Waters
  • The Stream, January 25, 2023: Sediment Buildup Will Shrink Reservoir Storage, UN Study Shows
  • What’s Up With Water – January 24, 2023
  • Federal Water Tap, January 23: EPA Lists New Enforcement Priorities
  • The Stream, January 18, 2023: The Killing of Two Water Defenders in Honduras Prompts Calls for Justice

Subscribe: Weekly Waternews

* indicates required
Please also subscribe me to the daily Stream
Please also subscribe me to the Federal Water Tap

© 2023 Circle of Blue – all rights reserved
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy

Donate to Circle of Blue
The Stream, November 13, 2019: Australia Prepares to Mobilize Army as 100+ Wildfires...The Stream, November 14, 2019: Second-Highest Tide On Record Hits Venice, Italy,... Scroll to top

This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.

OKLearn more

Cookie and Privacy Settings



How we use cookies

We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.

Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.

Essential Website Cookies

These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.

Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, refusing them will have impact how our site functions. You always can block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will always prompt you to accept/refuse cookies when revisiting our site.

We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.

We provide you with a list of stored cookies on your computer in our domain so you can check what we stored. Due to security reasons we are not able to show or modify cookies from other domains. You can check these in your browser security settings.

Google Analytics Cookies

These cookies collect information that is used either in aggregate form to help us understand how our website is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our website and application for you in order to enhance your experience.

If you do not want that we track your visit to our site you can disable tracking in your browser here:

Other external services

We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.

Google Webfont Settings:

Google Map Settings:

Google reCaptcha Settings:

Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:

Other cookies

The following cookies are also needed - You can choose if you want to allow them:

Accept settingsHide notification only
Make an impact this #GivingNewsDay
Journalism with this kind of impact is free to consume but costly to produce.
Support fact-based journalism with your tax-deductible donation
For a limited time, NewsMatch will match your gift, dollar for dollar
Support Independent Journalism
You have the power to inform the world's most important decisions
with your tax-deductible donation
 Twitter
 Facebook
 Reddit
 LinkedIn
 Copy
 Email