Green Infrastructures in Megacity Jakarta: Current Status and Possibilities of Mangroves for Flood Damage Mitigation

Abstract

Jakarta is Southeast Asia’s most disaster-vulnerable city and recently has suffered from severe floods almost every year. Flood events have worsened mainly because of ground subsidence, reduction of green spaces, and littering into streams. The mangrove forests remaining in coastal urban areas of northern Jakarta can be utilized for mitigating flood damage. In the first two sections of this chapter, an overview of flood events is presented and the status of mangroves in Jakarta Bay is introduced. Mangroves may serve as hard and soft measures for disaster reduction. Because enlargement of the area of mangroves in urban Jakarta is difficult, in the last section, soft measures, especially the utilization of mangroves as an icon for disaster reduction, are proposed. Activities such as the incorporation of a mangrove design as a logo in documents of disaster prevention education may enhance citizens’ recognition of disaster risks because they will see both logos and mangroves repeatedly in real life.

Green Waterfront City, Future Perspectives for Sustainable City in Tidal Flooding Prone Area at Northern Semarang

“…Natural mangroves provide numerous ecosystem services that help to achieve the SDGs both directly and indirectly. Mangrove ecosystems, for example, can be applied for mitigating flood risk, control carbon storage more efficiently than other terrestrial forests (SDG 13), provide habitat for fish and marine organisms (SDG 14), and provide fish products and important fishing grounds for coastal communities (SDG 2) (Kawata, 2022;Sasmito et al, 2023). Conserving remaining mangroves and restoring degraded ones may help mitigate climate change and reduce the effects of climate change on 296 million people living in tropical coastal communities, including Indonesia, the world's largest archipelagic country (Sasmito et al, 2023).…”