Indonesia wants to move its capital city to Borneo. Why, how, and will it work?
The Indonesian government has announced it will shift affairs 1,000km east to a forested island. Will it be a smart, green city or will it create new problems in a pristine rainforest environment?
A
fter decades of debate, the Indonesian government has finally triggered plans to shift the nation’s capital away from Jakarta – opting for a site 1,250km away on the island of Borneo, the island rich in biodiversity that is home to some of the Earth’s oldest rainforests.
In August – in the week of Indonesia’s 74th birthday – President Joko Widodo announced East Kalimantan as the location for the new city, which will include a new government HQ and homes for 1.5 million civil servants. Planners are aiming for a transfer date of 2024, with the project set to cost 466tn rupiah ($33bn). Though the seat of government will move to the as-yet-unnamed city, Jakarta will remain Indonesia’s financial and business centre.
“It is a strategic location at the centre of Indonesia, close to growing urban areas,” Widodo said. “The burden Jakarta is holding right now is too heavy as the centre of governance, business, finance, trade and services.”
At present the vast, crowded megacity of Jakarta – the world’s second most populous greater urban area, with more than 30 million residents – dominates Indonesia’s economic and political life. More than half of Indonesia’s 261 million citizens live on Jakarta’s island of Java, which generates 58% of GDP for the 17000-island archipelago.
The move is part of government attempts to devolve power, decision-making and opportunities beyond the island. “We don’t want all the money existing only in Java. We want it to be outside Java as well,” said Widodo. “This is for the realisation of economic equality and justice.”
But equality is only half the story. The Indonesian capital is beset by issues including overcrowding, poor sanitation, regular earthquakes, traffic deadlock and air quality that ranks among the poorest on the planet. But Jakarta’s most serious problem is that it is sinking.
Going downtown
Jakarta has the unwelcome label of being one of the world’s fastest-sinking cities. Founded in the fourth century on marshland, it boomed into a major port under 17th-century Dutch colonisers, who called it Batavia, but struggled with malaria outbreaks.
Today, decades of unchecked development combined with poor urban planning have left many residents in the city without access to plumbing or reliable piped water. With authorities only able to meet 40% of demand, and the city’s 13 rivers too polluted, residents rely on the extraction of water from underground aquifiers. The cumulative depletion of groundwater has destabilised the land and caused the sinking of buildings and infrastructure.
Parts of north Jakarta have sunk 2.5m (8 feet) in the last decade, and around 40% of the city currently lies below sea level. A project called the Great Garuda, a 32km sea wall designed to protect vulnerable areas from flooding, has stalled, with built sections already springing leaks. Observers say the $40bn project can only ever be an interim solution, buying the city a few decades at most.
Whole districts of the city look certain to be lost, with experts predicting that a third of streets – and up to 95% of northern Jakarta – will be underwater by the middle of the century. In the northern slum district of Muara Baru, a delapidated mosque sitting half-submerged in the tide serves as a warning of what might come. And with sea levels due to rise up to 238cm by 2100, the problems faced by sinking cities are unprecedentedly grave.
A new leaf
The new capital will occupy 180,000 hectares of land on East Kalimantan, close to the archipelago’s geographic centre, on the island that founding father Sukarno earmarked for his capital. In contrast with Java, Kalimantan – the name for the Indonesian portion of Borneo island, which it shares with Malaysia and Brunei – accounts for only 8.2% of the country’s GDP, while it enjoys a population density 38 times lower.
The government has branded its vision a “smart city in the forest”, promising that at least 50% of it will be green spaces. “We will not disturb any existing protected forest,” says planning minister Bambang Brodjonegoro. “Instead, we will rehabilitate it.” The new development will straddle the regions of Kutai Kartanegara and North Penajam Paser, which currently have a population of about 900,000.
In contrast with the islands of Java, Sulawesi, Bali and Lombok, which have all endured natural disasters in the last 20 months, the site is one of the least prone to natural disasters in the archipelago – an important consideration given that climate change is expected to increase the frequency and severity of natural disasters.
Conservationists, however, are concerned about the threat to endangered species that live on the island, including Bornean orangutans and sun bears, the world’s smallest bear species. Borneo is one of the few places in the world where orangutans still live in their natural habitat, though they have suffered due to palm-oil plantations and logging. Many naturalists are pessimistic that orangutan habitats will soon be swallowed up by development. “It’s just a matter of time,” one told the BBC.
Dr Jamartin Sihite, CEO of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOSF), is more philosophical. “Maybe you have heard the story of Julius Caesar when he went to Italy to Rome, and when he crossed the Rubicon river, he said: the die is cast. The government has decided to move the capital, so this is the time to adjust. We have to try to minimise the impact on the biodiversity – and not only on orangutans.
“A lot of people will be moving to the capital. They will need land. Where will the land come from? It will come from the forest. It means a lot of forest will be cut. These are the things that we have to minimise,” he says. “We hope that the government will protect the biodiversity hotspots.”
In particular, Sihite is keen to protect a reforested 1,800-hectare plot known Samboja Lestari, which BOSF bought up as ruined forest in 2001 and has converted into a rehabilitation centre to train orangutans before introducing them into the wild. He hopes the government can incorporate the reserve into its city-forest vision.
Overall, he seems cautiously optimistic. “I think they are smart,” says Sihite. “They are smart in using the theme of the ‘city-forest’, and they will be smart in using the existing trees on the island to become part of the city. But for us at the BOSF, it’s the impact beyond the city – that’s the thing we’re a little bit worried about. In Indonesia, we have a phrase: where there is sugar, the ant will come. When we have economic development, we have people, and these people will need food, and that will need more land.”
Indonesia wouldn’t be the first country to transfer its government affairs to a purpose-built alternative. Pakistan shifted its capital from Karachi to Islamabad in 1960, the same year Brazil opted to move its parliament to Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília – a city that, incidentally, required the clearing of pristine tropical savanna. In 2005, Myanmar shifted its capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw, while Putrajaya became Malaysia’s seat of government in 1999 to alleviate overcrowding in Kuala Lumpur.
Neighbouring governments will watch with interest in a region where capitals such as Bangkok and Manila are also sinking, and where rising sea levels threaten many coastal cities. But the project can’t be declared a success until the impact on Borneo’s unique natural heritage becomes clear. Property developers have already announced that they intend to build luxury hotels, apartments and strip malls in East Kalimantan.
If the move comes off, and Indonesia manages to build its “smart city in the forest”, it could mark a paradigm shift for how human beings can live sustainably en masse. If it doesn’t, the country could have two ecological disasters where there was previously only one.
The ideas presented in this article aim to inspire adaptation action – they are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Global Center on Adaptation.
