Climate Change and Urban Poor: Water-related Behavior in Jakarta

Abstract

Jakarta is a growing urban centre that is facing two problems: climate change and urban poverty. City authority of Jakarta has yet to prepare comprehensive public policies to address the two challenges of the city that has over 9 million population.  As a coastal city, Jakarta has a coastline up to 25 km long. The average elevation of land surface is 7 meters above sea level.  Around 40 percent of land surface are below the sea level. There are thirteen rivers flowing rainwater from high land of West Java through the city running into Jakarta Bay. Therefore the threat of climate change is not only due to rising sea levels but also flooding and drought.  It is estimated that around 1 million of the urban poor experiencing the vulnerability since most of them are illegally occupying the low land surrounding riversides.  The extreme weather is now happen frequently both in urban and rural area.  Since poor farmers and farm workers have no saving, some of them have trying to get the job in cities such as Jakarta. Their daily income is around USD 6 to USD 11. This article discusses how the urban poor act toward the impact of climate change. Since the urban poor have only subsistence income, they choose to live at the riversides in the all part of the city. They utilize the water resources for many purposes, utilize the short underground water table and also dump the waste into the river. This study discusses what the poor urban know and do regarding the water resources and its relationship with any evidence of climate change impact and vice versa. As an attempt to explore the possibility of linkages with climate change as an anthropogenic behaviour, this study tries to  develop how the current water governance effectively address the problem