Discard the Old, Herald the New

"The location is very strategic -- it's in the centre of Indonesia and close to urban areas."
"The burden Jakarta is holding right now is too heavy as the centre of governance, business, finance, trade and services."
Indonesian President Joko Widodo

"The move will have an environmental impact. Jakarta has suffered so many failures from pollution, water crisis, and flooding."
"We don't want these problems in the new capital."
Jasmine Puteri, senior forest campaigner, Greenpeace

"By moving the capital you're not going to solve the problems of Jakarta."
"The ones really excited about moving the capital are the developers."
Elisa Sutanudjaja, executive director, Rujak Center for Urban Studies

Floating houses on Mahakam river in Samarinda, near the site of the new capital.

BAY ISMOYO/AFP/Getty Images

Looking into the foreseeable future there are many island-states and cities in the world that have advance warning they will eventually be consumed by rising sea waters, among them Houston, Texas, Lagos, Nigeria, New Orleans, Louisiana, Washington, DC, Beijing, China. What most of these cities with the exception of Washington face has come about partially as a result of poor stewardship, using too much groundwater at a time of rising sea levels courtesy of climate change. Miami, Florida sees its Everglades receding as a result of irrigation of crops in an otherwise dry geology.

And in Jakarta, Indonesia, one of the world's mega-cities with its ten million population -- 30 million in its greater metropolitan population area, land misuse and abuse and groundwater extraction, exacerbated by rampant construction has resulted in environmental chaos. It is now classified as one of the fastest-sinking cities on the globe with a forecast that by 2050 a full third of the city may be fully submerged.

This is a disaster that has been seen unfolding for many years, and the process has simply accelerated since no remedial action has been undertaken. The subsidence of the city has left 40 percent of the city's residents without water piped into their homes. "The city is sinking by one to 20 centimetres a year", earth scientist Heri Andreas of Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia has stated along with his calculation that the ground in some areas of the city has already sunk two to four metres below sea level.

North Jakarta is sinking by about 25cm every year

Jakarta seems doomed, and its government has decided on abandoning it to its fate, more or less. Indonesia is preparing to move its capital to the eastern edge of Borneo Island, shifting its political centre safely away from the megalopolis on the edge of disintegration. The city was built in an earthquake zone near the confluence of 13 rivers. Built on swampland, the city is the victim of poor urban planning, resulting in confining congestion and deadly pollution levels.

An inspection of buildings in Jalan Thamrin, central Jakarta found many operators pumping groundwater without a permit   AFP

Now, the largest Muslim-majority country in the world has a proposed new location where it has been judged a "minimal" risk of natural disasters threaten. Indonesia owns 180,000 hectares of land on Borneo, with the Indonesian side of the huge island comprising five provinces known for rainforests, orangutans and coal reserves. The move will necessitate the building of new government offices and homes to accommodate the 1.5 million people who are civil servants.

The cost of this venture? About $44 billion. The government is prepared to submit a bill and a feasibility study results to its parliament for approval of a new capital. "The economic impact was good in Brazil" [when Brazil moved from Rio de Janeiro to the government-blueprinted Brazilia in 1960, a city cited as a model in well-planned, modernized urban architecture], enthused Rudy Prawiradinata, deputy minister for regional development.

"Environmental issues", he promised, would set the new city's design as yet another showpiece of urban architectural planning. Jakarta is to be retained as Indonesia's financial centre, while the city's chronic dysfunctional problems would be addressed responsibly, although it is already being suggested that the city will face neglect as the government focuses on its new site- and purpose-specific location, 'forgetting' the plight of its former capital.

On Track to Become an Undersea City 

High rises, gated compounds and marinas: the Islands    The Guardian

"Nobody here believes in the greater good, because there is so much corruption, so much posturing about serving the public when what gets done only serves private interests."
"There is no trust."
Sidney Jones, director, Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, Indonesia

"We need big steps now. If all the discussions get tied up with fishermen and development, there will eventually be a massive calamity and deaths and no choice but to give up on whole parts of Jakarta."
"If this wall [newly built Coastal Wall] breaks, there's simply no holding back the Java Sea."
"Jakarta  will flood all the way to the center of town, six kilometers from here. I could take you to twenty other places just like this."
Jan Jaap Brinkman, Dutch hydrologist

"Jakarta could become a 21st-Century version of Tokyo in the 20th Century, an example for urban redevelopment."
"A city that can't deliver basic services is a failed city. On top of conventional issues like flooding and urbanization, we now have climate change, tipping the scale."
"And at this rate, people will be fighting in the streets for increasingly limited resources like clean water and safe living spaces."
"Nature will no longer wait."
Irvan Pulungan, climate researcher, adviser to Jakarta's governor

Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas.

Jakarta may appear like a modern, technologically advanced city of the 21st Century with its freeways and skyscrapers, but look a little more critically and you see ports, high-rises, fish markets, slums, power plants, malls and polluted canals weaving their way through the area. Water is piped to fewer than half the population of 10-million, not by the authority of the municipality operating water plants, but by private companies charging extortionate rates through government concessions.

Rain forests in Indonesia have been burned down in favour of palm oil forests and the building of textile factories, causing air pollution floating over the country, reaching out to Malaysia. Waste and chemicals are dumped into waterways, leaving drinking water supply contaminated. The rural poor have migrated to the capital Jakarta to set up informal kampungs clustering along its canals, huts built on stilts, contaminating the waterways with their sewage.

Forget Venice. The fastest-sinking city is the Indonesian capital, parts of which are dropping at 25cm a year. Can an outlandish plan for a giant seawall and luxury waterworld city in the shape of a mythical bird save Jakarta from drowning? The Guardian

And everywhere in the city and beyond, residents dig their own wells in such numbers that the aquifers beneath the city are depleting and the city is sinking. Jakarta is sinking lower and faster than any other city on the Globe; the sea around it rises remorselessly and rainfall fails to resupply the shrinking aquifers because so much of the ground in Jakarta is covered with buildings, with roadways; concrete making the rain run off rather than into the earth.

Close to 40 percent of Jakarta now is below sea level.

The city suffers some of the worst traffic snarls in the world, while buildings sink in this city that suffers from lack of planning and municipal sewers. According to hydrologists, Jakarta has a decade in which to make an effort to halt its collapse into the sea. Over 97 percent of Jakarta is covered with concrete and asphalt; fields that once absorbed rain are no longer there. Shantytowns and apartment towers have displaced the native mangroves that once relieved monsoon-swollen rivers.

A former governor of Jakarta ordered the eviction of waterfront slums. He was a geological engineer by training, and as governor he undertook to solve some of the city's largest problems, to take control of the water supply from private companies, assembling a sanitation crew to remove sediment and garbage from rivers and canals, clearing out some of the informal slums obstructing waterways and soon a difference was seen as rain instead of causing floods, drained in  hours.

He failed to be re-elected, opposition was so strong against his efforts. Replaced by Islamists in this most populous of all Muslim countries, he was brought up on charges of blasphemy and served a two-year prison sentence. Climate scientist Ardhasena Sopalheluwakan feels it would be best "to give back part of North Jakarta to nature", to "reintroduce mangroves and rejuvenate some of the dozens of reservoirs that were actually part of old Jakarta".

Just "counteracting subsidence will account for 90 percent of what this city needs to do to deal with climate change", according to to hydrologist, Jan Jaap Binkman. Post WWII, Tokyo had sunk four meters since 1900. The city poured resources into infrastructure and established stricter rules on development. In a decade Tokyo became a symbol of urban innovation, able to cope with the effects of climate change.

Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas.