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- Overview
- A problem with deep roots
- Jakarta needs water
- Grand plans
- When the government goes...
- ...some are left behind
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Indonesia has grand plans for Jakarta—a new capital on Borneo, a giant bird-shaped sea wall to protect Jakarta itself—but they don’t solve the underlying problem.
JakartaApart from the narrow, unpaved road, the two-meter-high concrete coastal wall is the only thing that separates Suhemi’s small restaurant in North Jakarta from the sea. Her family depends on that wall. Growing up here in the Muara Baru neighborhood in the 80s and 90s, Suhemi used to play on the beach in front of her house. But by the 2000s the beach had disappeared, and the sea frequently inundated the neighborhood.
In 2002, the government built the coastal wall, to give the residents peace of mind and time—a respite from the steady sinking of the land under the city and the steady rising of the sea. But just five years later, in 2007, the wall proved no match for the worst floods in Jakarta’s modern history. Driven by a storm coming off the Java Sea and torrential rains, the floods claimed 80 lives around the city and caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage.
In Muara Baru, the storm surge collapsed the wall, and the sea flooded Suhemi’s house.
“The water reached more than one meter,” she recalls. “My father almost died after being swept by the current. He survived after holding on to a door frame. He’s still traumatized.”
Today a lot of Jakartans live with the constant threat of another trauma like 2007; some areas, less protected even than Muara Baru, live with chronic flooding. The situation is one reason the government of President Joko Widodo announced in 2019 that it would move the nation’s capital away from its largest city, off the crowded island of Java to a new city to be built on Borneo, on land that is now forest. Construction is to begin this summer.
Left: Jakarta's provincial government is now extending the coastal wall that already protects some parts of the north coast. At its completion, planned for 2030, it will stretch 29 miles. But with the coast sinking beneath it, the wall is only a temporary solution.
Photograph by Anton Raharjo, Pacific Press, LightRocket, Getty Images
Right: Workers dredge the Ciliwung River in East Jakarta, in November, in advance of the rainy season, in the hopes of improving the flow in the river and reducing flooding.
Photograph by Joshua Irwandi
For hundreds of years, flooding has been one of Jakarta’s biggest problems. The city, a major port, sits on a delta: Thirteen rivers flow through it on their way to Jakarta Bay from mountains to the south. The delta used to be lined with thick mangroves that provided a buffer against storm tides. Most of the mangroves were cut down long ago.
When the Dutch colonized Indonesia in 1619, they began transforming the city to make it resemble a typical Dutch town, with modern buildings and canals.The canals were meant to regulate the flow and to control flooding, but researchers argue that they exacerbated the underlying problem. The alluvial soil of the delta naturally compacts over time, causing the land surface to subside unless it is continually replenished with new sediment from overflowing rivers. The canals tended to prevent that.
In 2007, after the catastrophic flood, the provincial government adopted a regulation requiring at least 30 percent of the city’s total area to be allocated to green, open space. More green space is not just a matter of general well-being. It’s also needed to absorb floods driven by torrential rains—and to funnel them into recharging the city’s depleted groundwater aquifers. Less than 10 percent of the city is green today.
Massive groundwater extraction is one of the main drivers of land subsidence in Jakarta, a sprawling concrete labyrinth that’s not supported by a reliable water supply network. Jakarta’s piped-water system serves fewer than one million households, a little over a quarter of the city’s total. The rest rely primarily on pumping groundwater.
While such pumping is not illegal, it is subject to taxation. But the provincial government is unable to monitor and tax the untold numbers of unregulated deep wells scattered across the city, mostly hidden behind closed doors.
Batubara, who has spent years researching the cause of Jakarta flooding, says the number of deep wells has ballooned with the city’s population, rising from fewer than 400 in 1968 to more than 3,600 in 1998. No one knows how many wells there are today, he says, but it’s presumably much higher.
The provincial government says groundwater consumption reached more than 8 million cubic meters in 2018, the last year for which it has provided data. In 2016 it estimated that Jakarta had reserves of 852 million cubic meters. Independent researchers estimated in 2011, however, that Jakarta had already used an alarming 64 percent of its groundwater reserves. With little open space, groundwater is simply not being replenished. Rains run off to the sea.
Last year the provincial governor’s office announced a ban on groundwater extraction by owners of buildings larger than 5,000 square meters (about 54,000 square feet). The ban is set to take effect in August 2023. Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan has stated that by 2030, the piped-water network will supply the entire city. That would require a massive expansion of the existing network—and so far there is no sign of that happening on the required scale.
In recent years Jakarta has become an electoral battleground; its governorship has become a stepping stone to the national presidency. Environmental issues are never absent during the campaign. Gubernatorial candidates always promise to fix Jakarta—the chronic traffic and choking air pollution as well as the acute flooding.
But Jakarta can’t be fixed during one governor’s tenure. Years go by, governors come and go, and the problems persist.
Since 2014, the national and provincial governments have been working in partnership on a plan to defend the coast of Jakarta against the encroaching sea. Revised several times, the mega-project is currently organized in two phases.
The first is the construction of a 29-mile-long wall along the coast. About eight miles have already been built, and construction is expected to go into high gear in 2023. The wall outside Suhemi’s house is an early piece of the project—but as her experience illustrates, the coastal wall is at best a temporary solution.
In the second phase of the mega project, a “Giant Sea Wall” is to be constructed offshore in Jakarta Bay. It’s to include a 20-mile long artificial island in the shape of a bird—the Garuda, Indonesia’s national symbol. The 10,000-acre island will block storm surges, but it is also supposed to house offices and apartments, a water reservoir, highways and train tracks, as well as recreational facilities.
Critics say the Giant Sea Wall would obstruct the flow of the 13 rivers, turning Jakarta Bay into a giant pool of sewage. And since the whole mega-project fails to address the cause of land subsidence, it will eventually sink, says Parid Ridwanuddin, a sea and coastal campaign manager at the Indonesia Environmental Forum (Walhi). He thinks the government should focus more on rejuvenating coastal areas by replanting mangroves and by restoring riverbanks crowded with housing to a more natural state.
Construction of the new capital city on Borneo, on the other hand, is supposed to begin this year and to be finished by 2045.
The national government wants it to be a “global city for all,” a smart, green city that acts as a hub for industry, businesses, and education. The $35 billion projected cost is to be financed by the national budget, state-owned enterprises, and private investors. According to the government, the United Arab Emirates, China, and South Korea have expressed interest in investing.
But local indigenous communities aren’t so happy with the plan. They fear the project would destroy their land, forest, and livelihoods. Protests have been frequent in the past year.
In Jakarta, on the other hand, some welcome the decision to move the seat of government to Borneo, arguing that it will ease Jakarta’s burdens of crowding and pollution. Simarmata, the urban planning researcher, thinks “Jakarta should undergo a strict dietary program, to give up some of its urban function and to give more space for green areas.” Moving the government would be a good start, he says.
Henny Warsilah, a researcher at the Center for Society and Culture of the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), agrees.
“Jakarta will only lose its status as a capital,” he says. “But this will be a good chance to revitalize the city. The city already has some infrastructure to rise as a center for businesses or recreation.”
The vulnerable communities along the northern coast of Jakarta couldn’t care less about the new capital city. For residents like Suhemi and Astati, relocating to a safer place is definitely not an option.
In Astati’s Muara Angke neighborhood, just a few yards from the Kali Adem port where tourists depart for the Thousand Islands, the coastal wall has not yet arrived.
“The flood occurs not monthly, or weekly, but on a daily basis,” she says. Sometimes the water rises thigh-deep, and when the forecast is bad, “I usually post a status or a message on a community WhatsApp group telling residents to be prepared.”
Earlier this year, the residents of Muara Angke took matters into their own hands: They used rubble to raise the road along the coast about one meter.
Some residents, including Astati, a 40-year-old who makes her living farming green mussels, also raised the yards and floors of their homes—with hundreds of kilograms of mussel shells. The shells are a cheap way to keep seawater out of the house, she says, and they allow it to drain quickly.
“All we want is to not be concerned about flooding anymore.”
Jakarta, a megacity built on a delta, is rapidly subsiding and flooding as groundwater is over-extracted. The government plans to move the capital to Borneo, but the underlying problem remains unaddressed.
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