Indonesia’s congested mega-city and capital, Jakarta (Pop. 11.6 M (2025 estimate)), is sinking alarmingly, especially the northern part of the metropolis which is immersing inexorably at the rate of around 25cm every year. With Jakarta sitting on swampy land and with 13 rivers flowing through the city, these natural disadvantages have been compounded by the devastating impact of unchecked human activity. The trouble essentially is about water infrastructure, the city’s pipe-delivered water supply is neither of reliable quality nor highly available to most. Therefore, the principal source of water for drinking, bathing and sewerage for urban dwellers is groundwater extracted from below the city’s surface. With both the civil authorities and residents engaged in extracting water, the excessive removal of groundwater has created this catastrophic land subsidence. Frequent flooding of the city and rising sea levels driven by climate change propels the problem into a disaster situation. With the authorities only providing around 40% of urban residents’ needs, a large part of the population sources its own water needs by this method. People are supposed to have a permit to extract groundwater themselves but the laxity of government regulation creates a free-for-all for extractors. So, Jakartans are digging illegal wells which drains “the underground aquifers on which the city rests – like deflating a giant cushion underneath it” [‘Jakarta Is Sinking So Fast, It Could End Up Underwater’, Michael Kimmelman, New York Times, 21st December 2017, www.nytimes.com].

Other factors exacerbating Jakarta’s susceptibility to flooding crises are the paucity of green spaces and the city’s poor drainage system, two glaring indicators of Jakarta’s planning shortcomings. A substantial element of green open space would facilitate the absorption of excess water into the ground. Similarly, the poorly maintained and faulty micro drainage channel can’t deal with Jakarta’s extreme bouts of rain [‘Causes Of Jakarta Floods From The Analysis Of The Second Cawagub Of The Capital City’, VOI, 07 Maret 2020, www.voi.id].

The Jakarta authorities’ response has been to look for a fix to the monumental problem that DOESN’T tackle the core issue of over-extraction of the groundwater. With a comprehensive extraction program put in the too-hard tray, one solution proposed was to build an outer sea wall on the city’s coastline, nicknamed the “Great Garuda”. This has not been received warmly in some circles…critics point out it ignores the hub of the problem, is a “bandaid” solution and is at best an interim measure. Such a dilemma not seriously and properly addressed by the authorities can only magnify (source: www.abc.net.au).

The other approach to a solution for Jakarta which the national government and especially president at the time Joko Wododo was enthusiastic about, is the fairly radical step of moving Indonesia’s capital from overcrowded Jakarta to a jungle setting on the sparsely populated island of Borneo. Named (by Wododo) “Nusantara” and marketed by the government as “a forest city”, it has been costed at US$32.7 Bn. After a delay due to the Covid-19 outbreak work began the future capital in 2022. Critics have been quick to raise what they see as the folly in this decision, that is, it may have the consequence of only moving the problem somewhere else⚙︎, whilst not alleviating the ongoing environmental crisis affecting Jakarta [‘Why Indonesia is abandoning its capital city to save it’, Aljazeera, 9th November 2022, www.aljazeera.com].

Meanwhile, with the coastal environs of the city already more or less perpetually under water, Jakarta’s sinking feeling continues unabated. The doomsday news is that experts warn that unless a genuine viable remedy is arrived at, by about 2050 the coastal areas of Indonesia’s most populous city could be 95% underwater [‘Jakarta, the fasting-growing city in the world’ [Mayuri Mei Lin & Rafki Hidayat, BBC, 13th August 2018, www.bbc.com]. The question lingers in the air unanswered: Can Indonesia’s rulers get their planning act together in time?

⚙︎ one irony of the planned move is that Kalimantan, the province in which Nusantara is located is also prone to flooding

𓆉  𓆉  𓆉  𓆉 𓆉 𓆉   𓆉 𓆉 𓆉