It’s a sinking feeling in Jakarta

Jakarta is sinking. And the Indonesian government is racing against time to build a brand new capital city—a $32-billion project that will potentially see the relocation of millions of people to another island.  

But locals are unfazed.

 “I don’t see much of it,” says Jakarta resident M. Larsati, referring to the rising sea levels that experts say could submerge large swathes of the Indonesian capital by 2050.

“It (sea levels rising) is happening in the northern part of Jakarta and I live in the southern part, so we don't see much of the effects yet,” the 31-year-old Larsati tells TRT World. 

And even that rise, Larsati says, is “insignificant”.

Like her, Amanda Siddharta, 33, another Jakarta resident and a research scholar, is unimpressed by any reference to the city sinking. “I find it touching on the lines of sensationalism,” she says dismissively. 

“Jakarta is not going to be Atlantis.”

Experts warning

But experts are not so sure that Jakarta won’t go the way of the mythical Greek city said to have been swallowed by the sea following an earthquake.

However, in the case of Jakarta, it will be climate change and reckless use of groundwater that is leading to land subsidence.

Heri Andreas, who teaches geodesy at the Bandung Institute of Technology, says about 95 percent of North Jakarta could get submerged by 2050 as sea levels rise.

NASA, too, talks of the challenges confronting the Jakarta metropolitan area, “a conglomeration” of 32 million people on the Indonesian island of Java, saying 40 percent of the city is estimated to have already sunk below sea levels.

The threat to Jakarta is so great that even US President Joe Biden has taken note of it. At a talk on climate change at the US National Counter-Terrorism Center last year, he said it is feared Jakarta would likely sink in the next 10 years.

“What happens in Indonesia if the estimate is correct, that in ten years, they may have to move the capital because it sinks?” Biden said in his speech, posted on the official White House website.

So grave is the perceived threat level that risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, which provides data and insights into sustainability, resilience and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) issues of projects and companies, has ranked Jakarta as the “riskiest city” globally in terms of environmental challenges for investors.

Notes its Environmental Risk Outlook 2021 report: “The worst-performing city in the (global) ranking, Jakarta, is also plagued with dire air pollution, but compounding this are perennial threats from seismic activity and flooding. It is also subsiding at such a rate that Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, is seeking to relocate the capital.”

Mitigating steps

In January this year, the Indonesian parliament passed a bill approving the relocation of the capital to East Kalimantan — the Indonesian portion of Borneo island. 

But the new capital — to be named ‘Nusantara’ — is not being planned out of the fear of sea-level rise. Rather, it is designed to help “take off the pressure” off Jakarta, says Elisabeth Tarigan, a water management specialist with the city’s provincial government.

Tarigan, who has been working with Jakarta’s Water Resources Department since 2010 and is closely associated with the mitigation efforts underway to “save the city”, says the aim is not only to protect the northern part of Jakarta from the impact of rising sea levels, but also to deal with water flowing down from highlands to low-lying areas.

This would be done under a coastal defence programme, called the National Capital Integrated Coastal Development (NCICD).

Construction of a coastal embankment, polder systems and storage reservoirs are part of this defence strategy, says Tarigan. The embankment would protect the land from seawater, while the polder system would pump floodwaters into the sea.

Tarigan has been associated with mitigation efforts for the past 12 years and is hopeful that Jakarta can be saved. “We will not let it sink,” she says. 

 Annual Floods

At the same time, Tarigan admits flooding is an issue that cannot be wished away. “We cannot talk about not having floods,” she says.

“It is a natural process. The best we can do is to mitigate and adapt.”

And adapting and adjusting is what residents like Larsati are doing. “As a person who has lived in Jakarta for most of her life, it’s something we’ve kind of got used to.”

Larsati says it’s “not normal”, but “sadly”, that is the case. “Whenever it rains, you have to prepare for the flooding. More and more people are realising that.”

At the same time, for Larsati, relocating to Nusantara, some 2,000 km northeast of Jakarta across the Java Sea, is out of the question.

“To move to the new capital, to move the capital away, wouldn’t solve anything,” says Larsati. “I mean, you’re just going to be moving your problems elsewhere.”

It’s also not something that is part of her daily conversations, she says.

“It's kind of alarming because we live in Jakarta and our city is sinking, but I think most people just don’t really care about it; it’s like, okay, we’ll make do when the problem appears."