Summary:

• ■ The Jakarta Metropolitan Area (JMA) has long struggled to balance environmental protection and economic growth. The problem of flooding in the metropolitan area has been linked to several factors such as urban development, land-use changes and natural disasters.

• ■ This study examines to what extent Nature-Based Solution (NBS) infrastructure, a cost-efficient intervention to assist cities prevent floods, can reduce flood occurrence in the JMA.

• ■ This study suggests the importance of hygiene behaviour and NBS infrastructure as well as a potential correlation between economic performance and disaster in the JMA.

INTRODUCTION

The Jakarta Metropolitan Area (JMA) has long struggled to balance environmental protection and economic growth. The term JMA (Sadewo et al. 2021; Rukmana and Ramadhani 2021) (6°10‘30”S 106°49‘43’E) is used in this study to analyse the relationship between urban expansion and flooding in nine cities and municipalities. The problem of flooding in the metropolitan area has been linked with several factors such as urban development, land-use change and natural disasters (Wihanesta et al. 2021; Budiyono et al. 2015; Mishra et al. 2018). The decentralization of authorities at the district level has brought further complexity, with variations in interest and policy leading to different environment management strategies between districts within the JMA.

The complexity of environmental management in the JMA begins with the industry re-allocation towards neighbouring districts such as Bekasi and Tangerang regencies in the 1990s. The following figure depicts the JMA region with its core (cities in Jakarta province) and peripherals (several cities and regencies surrounding the core), West Java and Banten provinces, and non-JMA regions (see Figure 9.1). Currently, peripheral districts in the region have the highest employment and value-added shares in Indonesia, whilst the metropolitan cores have declining firm and employment densities (Hudalah and Aritenang 2017). The JMA can be seen as the main economic driver of the country with more than 56 per cent of multilocational industry headquarters located in the metropolitan area, especially in three sectors: electronics; automotive and transportation; and food and beverage.

There are limited studies examining the impact of floods on different parts of the metropolitan area and the extent of infrastructure variations that determine these impacts.