National – Sub-national Government partnerships are key
Indonesia is adding 50 million m2 of housing every year1 and the UN estimates that by 2050, 70% of Indonesia’s population will live in urban areas. This rapid urbanisation is driving demand for new housing like never before.
According to Sandra Pranoto, Senior Advisor, GBPN Indonesia, this is an unprecedented opportunity to ensure that the thousands of new buildings incorporate cutting edge sustainability principles. However, while the Indonesian government is very supportive of sustainable building goals it has struggled to implement effectively.
“The will and enthusiasm is definitely there amongst policy-makers but the difficulty is understanding how to go about it. There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Ms Pranoto said.
“This is where GBPN can add real value. GBPN has worked closely with local building experts and policy makers in Indonesia over the past two years to refine a set of strategies that aims to enable the decarbonisation of the built environment through policy reform.
“We have the know-how and we design our projects so we work collaboratively with local experts to customise these principles and adapt them to local needs.”
Building opportunities to meet zero-emission goals
Early engagement with Indonesia’s government highlighted that the country lacked a forum for high level collaboration between key government stakeholders, including ministries at a national level, and between the national and sub-national governments. Together with its partners, GBPN is taking the lead on creating a platform to bring these key stakeholders together.
Ratri Widyadari, National Strategic Advisor, GBPN Indonesia, said the GBPN Policy Hub would provide a platform to facilitate dialogue with government at all levels.
“Connecting sub-national pilot projects to national policy reforms is the key to enabling Indonesia to achieve its NDCs and zero-emission goals,” she said.
“Our aim is to support the national governments to align their policies and green building initiatives, and also involve the subnational governments’ engagement to inform the national initiatives.
“As the Policy Hub develops, we will look to include other key stakeholders, such as key experts and industry representatives.”
Ms Widyari said the Policy Hub platform was a great complement to existing work being conducted to develop and foreground local expertise through a project known as HIDUP.
“HIDUP is a Bahasa Indonesia word meaning ‘Alive’ and it is all about connecting local and global experts, and bridging unmet expertise on policy reform strategies, evidence base and education needs,” she said.
“The Policy Hub, alongwith HIDUP is driving meaningful engagement in Indonesia to inform and reform green building policy initiatives.”
Enabling an ecosystem of green building policies
GBPN in collaboration with its local partner agencies and strong network of experts, is supporting the government agencies to take charge. As a change-enabler in the built sector, GBPN is enabling local stakeholders and government agencies to adopt policy reforms that are evidence-based, suited to the local environment and easily implementable.
Ms Pranoto said GBPN was able to provide data-driven research from the sub-national and municipal levels to the national government to support policy planning and reforms both directly and through its network of local partners.
“Our programmes in Indonesia, with the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources, the Ministry of Finance, the governments of Samarinda and Bali, are all designed to support the agencies to take the lead in creating policy reform changes,” she said.
The Head of Housing Division in the New Capital Taskforce under Indonesia’s Ministry of Public Works and Housing, Mr Dedy Permadi, said GBPN provided a critical piece of the puzzle that had been missing.
“Indonesia has attempted several measures to improve building performance through better legislation at national and local level,” Mr. Permadi said.
“However, the regulation has been too top-down and not informed by global best practices, thus they were often not effective and applicable in Indonesia.
“And then GBPN brought its global knowledge and expertise, in addition to its rich understanding of Indonesia residential building energy performance based on their research.
“GBPN manages to combine both modalities and assisted us in formulating the first ever vertical housing building code and KPIs, that we will apply and test in our new capital city housing. This model code and KPI document is an easy to digest document which I believe will be applicable for Indonesia context.”
Reducing carbon emissions and improving the lives of residents
GBPN’s objective in Indonesia is to support the government’s zero-emission goals and the built environment is a critical element towards achieving that goal, as it represents a significant component of growth in emissions over time.
Mayor of South Tangerang, Benyamin Davnie, who is engaged with a GBPN pilot project in his city, said building more sustainably would have multiple benefits.
“If energy costs can be saved, it will improve the welfare of the people in South Tangerang. In addition, these energy efficiency efforts can reduce global warming and the negative impacts of climate change” he said.
Mr Davnie was speaking at the launch of the collaboration between South Tangerang Municipality, GBPN and the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (MEMR) to develop an energy efficiency roadmap for buildings in South Tangerang.
Mayor of South Tangerang, Benyamin Davnie (centre) with team members involved in launching the pilot project.
Unprecedented opportunity to have an impact at large scale
Dr Peter Graham, GBPN CEO, said it was imperative that organisations like GBPN work quickly to change the way we build – especially in places like Indonesia where the amount of new building in the coming years is expected to increase dramatically.
“We have an unprecedented opportunity to have an enormous impact on greenhouse emissions by not only building more efficiently but creating buildings that will operate more efficiently over their entire lifespan,” he said.
“Our experiences in Samarinda and Bali shows that change is possible and it’s happening. The work we’re doing can not only have an enormous impact on reducing carbon emissions in the building sector, it is also offering better living standards for thousands of Indonesian families.
“We now need to scale up our efforts and introduce these approaches in other regions across Indonesia, including the new capital city.”
- ClimateWorks Foundation Homes Energy Demand Baseline Report
