By Hans Nicholas Jong
JAKARTA — Ni Komang Ayu Leona Wirawan left her hometown of Klungkung, on the island of Bali, for Jakarta on neighboring Java three years ago to attend law school.
The contrast between the two places could not be greater: one is a farming and fishing district of 180,000 people; the other, a sprawling, chaotic conurbation of more than 30 million, one of the biggest in the world.
While a metropolis like Jakarta offers abundant opportunities for an enterprising 21-year-old like Wirawan, it cannot give her the most fundamental thing of all: clean air.
“Sometimes I don’t want to go out of the house because of the dirty air,” Wirawan said. “Sometimes I miss my home in Bali.”
Jakarta currently has some of the world’s filthiest air. In the past few weeks, it ranked repeatedly as the world’s most polluted city, with levels of PM2.5 reaching “unhealthy” concentrations.
Fed up with the worsening pollution, Wirawan joined a group of 30 other Jakarta residents from a wide range of backgrounds to file a citizen lawsuit against the Indonesian government for failing to address public concerns over the poor air quality in the capital.
The lawsuit, filed on July 4 by the Jakarta Advocacy Team, holds seven top government officials liable for the problem, including President Joko Widodo and Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan. The group had long sought to bring attention to the air pollution problem, warning during a protest last December that it would file suit if its demands went unheeded.
Nelson Nikodemus, a lawyer at the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute, part of the Jakarta Advocacy Team, told reporters at the court, "These seven officials, in our view, have ignored the rights of Jakarta citizens and Indonesian citizens who live and work in Jakarta to breath healthy air."
Among their demands, the activists want a comprehensive research-based plan to reduce air pollution, similar to what the Chinese government did in 2014 when it declared war on air pollution and unveiled an action plan to improve overall air quality across the country within five years.
Government Officials in Denial and Deflection
Official responses to the citizen lawsuit have been varied. The Ministry of Environment and Forestry, for instance, said the activists were within their rights to do so, but questioned the air quality data they presented in their suit.
“Of course we will provide answers on what we’ve done to reduce air pollution,"M.S. Karliansyah, the ministry’s director environmental degradation mitigation and control, said at a press conference. “I’m worried that the data [used] is only temporary data, not an average.”
Governor Baswedan, for his part, has sought to shift the blame to the public, including the activists, for not using public transportation often enough.
“Those people filing the lawsuit have also contributed to the air quality decline. Unless everyone rides a bicycle, it would be different if that’s the case,” he told the press. “The air quality is not only caused by one or two professions, but by all of us, including those that filed the civil lawsuit."
Andono Warih, the head of Jakarta Environmental Agency, also questioned the data used by the activists, taken from the air-quality monitoring app AirVisual, saying it was not accurate and that conditions were “not that bad.” He said the app used for its rankings the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index (AQI), which he claimed made the air pollution in Jakarta seem worse than it was.
AirVisual collects its data from various sources, including the U.S. Embassy’s air quality monitors, the Indonesian Meteorological Agency (BMKG), and Greenpeace Indonesia.
Karliansyah said the three devices used by Greenpeace Indonesia were not accurate because they were portable and used primarily for measuring indoor air pollution.
“We’ve studied [the accuracy of the device] and they can’t differentiate between dust particles and water particles, which is why the readings [of PM2.5] are high,” he said.
Greenpeace Indonesia campaigner Bondan Andriyanu said the NGO was no longer using those devices, and had replaced them with the AirVisual Pro, which has been certified for both indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring, with high accuracy for measuring PM2.5 levels.
“These devices are used all around the world,” he said. “To date, there’s not a single government around the world that questions [the accuracy of] the device.
“This is not the time to debate the methodology and the devices,” he added. “What’s clear is that the air pollution in Jakarta is already severe and we need to do something about it.”
Andriyanu pointed out the ministry’s own data also showed worsening air quality in Jakarta. There were 196 days last year when the air was deemed unhealthy for certain sensitive groups, such as pregnant women and children, according to the official data.
“But there’s been no action from the government,” Andriyanu said. “The least they could do is to announce it [in real time], but why wait until 2019 to announce that the air quality was unhealthy for more than half the year in 2018?"
Lax, Outdated Environmental Standards
Andriyanu said the ministry’s own data should also be subject to scrutiny, given that the ministry operates just one monitoring station in the capital. There needs to be at least 26 such stations peppered throughout Jakarta, he said, to give an accurate representation of air quality across the city.
Karliansyah countered that the monitoring station could measure air pollution within a radius of five kilometers. He added the ministry wanted to install more stations, but the cost was prohibitive.
Jakarta Environmental Agency would soon install 10 new monitoring stations to measure PM2.5 levels throughout the capital, at a cost of US$354,000 each. The city currently operates five such stations, but they’re only capable of measuring the much larger PM10 particles. They also lack a real-time monitoring feature.
Andriyanu said the government’s insistence that air pollution was under control was misleading. The standard for what constituted an unhealthy concentration of PM2.5 was much more lax than elsewhere in Asia or as recommended by the World Health Organization, he suggested. The latter’s safe threshold for PM2.5 exposure in a 24-hour period is 25 micrograms per cubic meter; Indonesia’s threshold is nearly three times higher, at 65 micrograms per cubic meter.
The Indonesian threshold, according to Andriyanu, was determined in 1999 and needs to be updated.
“Even if there are plenty of air monitoring devices, if we still use the old standard, which is weak, then the government can say that the air pollution is still mild,” he said. “Even when people are having trouble breathing.”
He cited the case of Jambi province on the island of Sumatra, which was blanketed with thick smog from forest fires earlier this year.
“The fires were raging hard and thousands of people suffered respiratory problems, and yet the monitoring stations still recorded the air pollution as mild,” Andriyanu said. “It’s a proof that the current monitoring stations have weak standards and aren’t capable of protecting the public from air pollution.”
In response to the outdated standard, Karliansyah claimed the environment ministry has plans to adjust the PM2.5 safe threshold to 35 micrograms per cubic meter.
Environmental Activists Demand Government Action
Wirawan, the law student filing suit over the pollution, said she is frustrated with the government’s constant denials about the severity of the problem.
“I want this lawsuit to be followed up because even now, the government continues to be stubborn when it comes to air pollution, choosing not to believe the data or the methodology,” she said. “They’re stubborn and yet they do nothing. I really want to see action, either switching to gas- or electric-based vehicles, or subsidies for environmentally friendly transportation so that people will want to switch.”
The plaintiffs are also demanding the government systematically investigate and address all sources of air pollution. Vehicle emissions account for up to 70 percent of the pollution, Karliansyah said, citing a 2013 study carried out by the government and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
However, a 2016 study by the NGO Committee to Phase Out Leaded Fuel (KPBB) yielded a different result, saying that vehicles only account for 47 percent of the air pollution in the capital. It ranks emissions from factories next, at 22 percent, followed by road dust and households (11 percent each), waste incineration (5 percent) and construction work (4 percent).
Burning of coal is also a factor, said Agung Pujo Winarko, the head of pollution mitigation at the Jarkata Environmental Agency.
“The two power plants in Jakarta use gas. Coal is still used in some industrial activities in Jakarta” he said.
Addressing vehicle-based pollution would not be enough, Andriyanu said. He noted that even after Jakarta’s notorious gridlock had been reduced, with the city winning an award for its much-improved public transportation system, the air pollution problem only got worse.
“The number of unhealthy days in 2018 was actually double that in 2017,” he said, citing data from the U.S. Embassy’s two monitoring stations. “So as our transportation system improved, the number of unhealthy days actually doubled. That’s the fact and that’s a form of negligence [on the part of the government] because the policies they’ve adopted aren’t based on data or a clear roadmap.”
Khalisah Khalid, a spokeswoman for the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), said she hoped the citizen lawsuit would jolt the government into action. Her daughter, Jingga, was particularly sensitive to air pollution, suffering frequent nosebleeds as a result.
“There are a lot of children like Jingga who are very vulnerable from any change in air quality,” Khalid said. “Imagine if she has to go to school every day inhaling dirty air, which is dangerous for her health. I’m worried about the health of my daughter and other children who are exposed [to air pollution].”
Read Next: Environmental Protests in Wuhan Stalled a Local Waste Incinerator Proposal
The News Lens has been authorized to publish this article from Mongabay, an environmental science and conservation news and information site.
If you've enjoyed this article and want to receive more story updates, please be sure to like our Facebook page below.
TNL Editor: Daphne K. Lee (@thenewslensintl)
