![]() ![]() He says most of the sinking is due to households, developers, and industry illegally extracting groundwater to obtain free fresh water. “It’s treating the symptoms, not the cause,” says Christophe Girot, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who did a case study on Jakarta. Skeptics say it could exacerbate corruption, spur more development, and avoid fixing the root of the problem: massive groundwater extraction. A government study said it could erode islands, damage natural habitats such as coral reefs, and force the relocation of thousands of coastal people including fishermen. ![]() Now, it’s proposing a new 250-mile-long, four-story-high sea barrier. Japan’s 2011 tsunami brought waves that overwhelmed its seawalls, leading to a meltdown at its coastal Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Yet seawalls have failed to prevent catastrophe. The Dutch have built huge dikes, and in 2010, South Korea finished the world’s longest man-made one: the 22-mile Saemangeum Seawall. government spent more than $14 billion on gates and walls to protect New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005. ![]() Countries across the globe will build walls to protect themselves, because the price of these projects is cheaper than the cost of flooding, according to a 2014 study. Their popularity is on the rise as the world’s seas, almost a foot higher than a century ago, are projected to climb more because of climate change. Since ancient times, seawalls have been built to keep water at bay. Officials will then decide whether to give the go-ahead for the final two phases, but it’s unclear what they’ll do.Īlso unclear: Would this project, which has plenty of skeptics, even work? Last year, the city began work on the first phase, which entails raising the existing sea wall an average of seven feet over the next two years. The Great Garuda, as it’s known, has only just begun. That’s completely new,” says Coenen, who’s managing the project in Jakarta for the engineering and consulting firm of Witteveen+Bos, part of a Dutch consortium that prepared the master plan. Together, the wall and islands would be shaped like a Garuda, the mythical bird-like creature of Hinduism that’s the national emblem of Indonesia. To help pay for the $40 billion-plus behemoth, developers could buy land on 17 new artificial islands and build luxury homes, shopping malls and Grade-A offices. In three phases over three decades, it aims to build an exterior wall off the coast that would be 25 miles (40 kilometers) long and 80 feet high, a third of which would sit above sea level. So this former Dutch trading post is embarking on one of history’s biggest seawall projects. In 50 years, current streets could be at least 10 feet below it. In 15 years, 80 percent of the northern city will lie below sea level-up from 40 percent now. Last Christmas, during high tide, water poured over the Pluit seawall. In fact, Jakarta could be the Titanic of the world’s metropoles, a place where children wade through waist-deep brackish water to get to school and nearly half its people live with frequent flooding. “The city cannot keep up with the sinking,” says the Dutch physical geographer during a tour of the town, noting it’s dropping 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) each year on average and up to 10 inches in some areas-exponentially faster than Venice, the famous “City of Water.” ![]() A little girl wearing flip flops walks along the wall, only a couple feet off the ground.Ĭoenen points to cranes trying to clear waterways that are clogged with plastic debris and water hyacinth while nearby, in the low-lying Pluit district, mopeds and bicycles ride through flooded streets. JAKARTA, IndonesiaStanding on the banks of Jakarta Bay, Victor Coenen sees flimsy houses with sheet metal roofs sitting on the city’s seawall. ![]()
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