Benefits of green space for air quality improvement and GHG emissions reduction in Jakarta

Jakarta as the capital city of Indonesia, since 2012 have enacted Jakarta Spatial Plan 2030. Jakarta 2030 is a statutory long term plan that can be categorized as comprehensive spatial plan that provide the vision and goals of the city development for the next 20 years. One of the main and interesting issue in the Jakarta 2030, is they will increase the area of green space up to 30% of all Jakarta area. The current green space only covers around 12.2% from total Jakarta area. In order to achieve their goals of providing adequate green space, in the next 20 years, the municipality along with the society and private entity must provide additional 17.8% of the total Jakarta to green space. Even though the needs, importance and awareness of green space in Jakarta have aroused and even put as an integral part of Jakarta Spatial Plan 2030 towards promoting sustainable development and mainstreaming the importance of environmental aspects to be considered in the development plan of the city, Jakarta have not provide adequate guidelines to measure, value and quantify the level of benefits of the provisioning of green space to the city and its local residents in air quality context and to the reduction of carbon emissions. Contribution of this study is to become more apparent about the importance of protecting and promoting green space as part of city’s development, especially by making the benefit quantified, measured, and in the end, visible, in particular with regard to health and economic benefit as impact of GHG emissions reduction and air quality improvement. Main findings of this study is the provisioning of green space in Jakarta for 30% in 2030 will reduce GHG emissions reduction by up to 1.67 million tonnes of CO2e, and will reduce the PM10 concentration in Jakarta up to 33.27 μg/m3, SO2 up to 6.39 μg/m3, NO2 up to 16.92 μg/m3, and O3 up to 44.83 μg/m3. These numbers of reductions give a significant health and economic impact to Jakarta. For health impacts, some of the important impacts are mortality will be reduced to 319 cases, hospital admission related to air pollution will be reduced to 346 cases, emergency room visit related to air pollution will be reduced to 5,807 cases, asthma attacks related to air pollution will be reduced to 87,343 cases, chronic bronchitis related to air pollution will be reduced to 1,510 cases, and respiratory symptoms among adults related to air pollution will be reduced to 266,384 cases. In total, the potential economic benefit of the provisioning of green space in Jakarta for 30% in 2030 is estimated between 4.2 trillion rupiah to 6.7 trillion rupiah, or about 435.2 to 697.1 million US dollar. By forecasting the local budget of Jakarta in 2030, the potential economic benefit of the provisioning of green space in Jakarta for 30% in 2030 is estimated around 2.8% to 4.6% of the local budget.