Jakarta’s Air Quality Crisis: Data and Impacts Explored

To the citizens, leaders, and children of Jakarta in the year 2050, greetings from your past, from the year 2025.

We are writing to you from a pivotal moment in our history, a time when the air we breathed became a central-defining crisis. We see the newsfeeds from your time, images of a skyline no longer shrouded in a perpetual haze whilst reports of green mobility and renewable energy as the norm. To you, this might be standard. To us, it was a desperate ambition, a future we fought policy through data and collective will to survive

We write this not just as a history lesson, but as a testament. A desperate reminder of the cost of inaction and the profound value of the clear air you now enjoy. For us, the data was both the sign of agony and our catalyst for change.

The Data That Painted a Grim Picture

In our time, Jakarta’s air quality was not a matter of subjective feeling; it was quantified, measured, and relentlessly grim. For years, our city consistently ranked among the most polluted megacities on Earth. Our air quality index (AQI) would regularly soar past 150 (“Unhealthy”), frequently breach 200 (“Very Unhealthy”), and on our worst days, touch a horrifying 300+ (“Hazardous”).