Moving Indonesia's Capital City

Moving Indonesia’s capital city

Indonesia has announced plans to move its capital from the climate-threatened megalopolis of Jakarta to the sparsely populated island of Borneo, which is home to some of the world’s greatest tropical rainforests.

President Joko Widodo said the move was necessary because the burden on Jakarta was “too heavy”, but environmentalists said the $33bn relocation needed to be carefully handled or it would result in fleeing one ecological disaster only to create another.

As well as dire problems of pollution and traffic congestion, Jakarta suffers from severe subsidence, which makes the coastal city extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels.

The relocation aims to ease the pressure on Jakarta by moving its administrative functions about 1,000km to Kalimantan, which is the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo (which is also shared with Malaysia and Brunei.) Jakarta will continue to be a commercial and financial centre, and the majority of its nearly 10 million residents are likely to stay.

If parliament approves, construction on the new capital would begin next year on a plot of 40,000 hectares. By around 2024, the government expects to start moving some of its 1.5 million civil servants to the new bureaucratic centre.

Jakarta has sucked people and money to the island of Java, which is home to 60% of the country’s population and more than half of its economic activity. Kalimantan is almost four times bigger, but accounts for less than a tenth of the gross domestic production. Despite the presence of a few major cities, its population density is 38 times lower than that of Java.

The government says its wants to build a smart, green city on state land near the existing urban centres of Balikpapan and Samarinda and has promised the environmental impact will be positive.

Known as Kalimantan, Indonesia’s section of Borneo – the island it shares with Malaysia and Brunei – is home to major mining activities as well as rainforests, and is one of the few places on Earth with orangutans in their natural habitat. but we  are already worried that it could endanger Borneo’s remaining forests and raise carbon emissions.

Borneo’s deforestation has slowed in recent years as palm-oil prices have gone down. But some environmentalists fear that arrival of new residents on the island could threaten the remaining healthy forests.

Relocating 1.5 million people out of Jakarta is not going to resolve the city’s subsidence problem, given that Jakarta’s population grows by about 250,000 people every year.

Before it approves relocation of the capital, the Indonesian parliament should guarantee sufficient resources will be available to address Jakarta’s transport and subsidence problems. And it should ensure any new capital is in a location that’s not going to worsen the region’s fire and haze problem.