Bad Air, Good Air: Jakarta, Indonesia

By Wombat | February 26th, 2006 | 2 Comments »

When I read this article by Adianto P. Simamora in the Jakarta Post, it reminded me strongly to avoid Jakarta on my next sojourn into Java. Can you imagine only having 28 good air quality days in a year!.

Good air hard to find in smog-filled Jakarta
Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

That hacking cough is telling you something after all: Jakarta’s air quality is getting worse, and vehicular emissions are a prominent contributor, a survey revealed Friday.

There were only 28 good air quality days in 2005, compared to 53 the previous year, the Jakarta Environmental Management Agency said.

“The air we breathed was mostly of a moderate quality level last year,” Daniel Abbas of the agency’s environmental harm control unit told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

“The real fact is that the air quality has steadily worsened in Jakarta. The main contributors are pollutants emitted from motorized vehicles.”

The city administration has five air quality monitors which are stationed in Senayan, Central Jakarta; Pondok Indah, South Jakarta; Kemayoran, Central Jakarta, and at the offices of the South and West Jakarta municipalities.

They gauge the presence of five main pollutants — particulate matter with a diameter of less than 10 microns (PM10), nitrogen oxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), carbon monoxide (CO) and ozone (O3).

The higher the percentage of the five pollutants, the worse the air quality.

Daniel said traffic jams also affected the city’s air quality through increased nitrogen oxide emitted by the vehicles.
Health expert Budi Haryanto said the results were “a serious warning” of the effects of living in the smog-filled city.

“The air pollution will greatly affect Jakartans’ health,” said the head of the environmental health department of the University of Indonesia’s medical school.

Long-term exposure to air pollution would adversely affect people’s respiratory condition, he said.

“The World Health Organization’s Euro Data 2004 shows that exposure to PM10 will decrease the life expectancy of people by one year, increase the mortality rate and cause lung and heart problems,” he said.

Air pollution also is a carcinogen.

“Toxins from the inhaled air also will be hazardous to the blood and lungs. In the worst cases, people at risk can get lung cancer and leukemia from long-term exposure to polluted air.”

Ranking third for air pollution among the world’s major cities after Mexico City and Bangkok, Jakarta’s chronic and worsening problems prompted the local administration to impose the 2005 bylaw on air pollution control. The bylaw, which took effect early this month, bans people from smoking in public locations and requires a vehicle emissions test for drivers renewing their vehicle registration.

The bylaw also promotes the use of natural-compressed gas to replace gasoline.

In practice, the much-praised bylaw has failed to elicit an enthusiastic response from Jakartans, many of whom continue to flout the law during the “grace” period before full implementation.

Swiss Contact program officer Ari Muhammad said agencies under the city administration should promote integrated cooperation in the fight to improve air quality.

“We hope that the responsibility of improving air quality will not merely lie in the hands of the environmental agency, for other city agencies must also put prioritize programs to lessen air pollution,” he said.