On January 7 2025, POI had an opportunity to attend an event organized by UNDP in the heart of South Jakarta, Blok M, with the title of the event is “Grassroots to Greatness: Reimagining Community-Driven Innovations for Sustainable Urban Development”, with attendees across the globe, such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia. Also, many stakeholders have been involved, the governments, NGO, institutions, local community, college representative, and media partner. This huge event mainly discussed major challenges towards Sustainable Development Goals.
After some sort of first speech and opening by the UNDP Indonesia representative, the event continued to discuss major issues nowadays, which hypothetically have a strong derivation for sustainable development: IKN forest city development and waste management.
According to the forum, a sustainable city is a priority for a developing country like Indonesia, since Jakarta is slowly going to sink and has overcrowding problems, the government is taking action to move Indonesia’s capital city to the heart of Indonesia, the island of Borneo. On the other hand, Borneo or Kalimantan has a dynamic creation of mother nature, lush rainforest, clean river, and mega biodiversity, now in a dangerous situation due to IKN development. Building a new city from scratch means all of that vegetation and biodiversity will be impacted by the building process, not to mentionthe local tribes assume this development as a threat to their community. So, deep research and community gathering with local, government, stakeholder, and environmentalists should be necessary to discuss what the future holds for this region.
After a break, UNDP groups all of the participants to join an FGD to discuss the main concern. POI itself is marked as NGO representative. FGD stands for Focus Group Discussion, there were three major topics from focus group discussion: Social Innovation and Community Empowerment, Promoting community-driven climate action through innovation, and Optimizing Frontier Technologies for Sustainable Urban Development. POI contributed to the second topic, due to the POI’s main focus on climate change.
FGD was quite interesting and intense. Many perspectives were expressed, and whatever happens in the discussion, there is one point which we have agreed: climate change starts from our own human resources, as trivial as throwing rubbish in its place, if we concerned about climate change by ourselves, we could fight as a generation with a lot of influence in our climate, and the government as well, therefore, all of policies, behavior, and community circumstances will declare a war against climate change. For example, look at Singapore, now they have their own habit to prevent climate change, and their concerns start from regulation through waste management. Speaking about regulation, Singapore is also known as the most disciplined country in Southeast Asia, and they begin with their human resource.
In Indonesia, Major problems start from our own household, and the most dependent community is a family community and an educational community. If Indonesian people can fix their own habits within the family and household scale, it’s not impossible Indonesia could be the best country in terms of climate resilience, since we have a large population and young (productive) population as well, then waste management knowledge is very essential on the developed country who depend on mass consumption,
Apart from that point, POI also contributes to inform that maps also play an important role in overcoming the climate crisis. The area of mountain waste, land degradation, deforestation, forest and landfires, and areas of waste pollution are some examples, they can only be analyzed by maps, and with maps, all impacts and consequences on the surrounding areas will be easy to identify, in order to solve the problem of today’s climate crisis.
