Indonesia is considering building a huge seawall to prevent its largest city Jakarta from sinking into the ocean.
The country is the world’s largest archipelago consisting of over 17,000 islands but rising sea levels are putting its future in peril.
It’s capital Jakarta sinks roughly 25cm annually because of excessive groundwater extraction and urban development leading authorities to consider the options at their disposal.
Airlangga Hartarto, the coordinating minister for the economy, recently spoke on the need to protect the city from disaster.
He said: “We need the giant sea wall to stop the land from sinking and the sea from flooding, which keep happening all the time.”
If completed, the project would be one of the most ambitious developments ever undertaken in the country and one of the most expensive.
The wall would include the building of a 74.5-mile coastal and river dike by 2030 and an adaptive sea wall to the west and east of Jakarta by 2040 before closing the sea wall with a reservoir by 2050 at a cost of £48 billion.
Hartarto acknowledges the steep cost of the project but warns that the country cannot afford not to act.
He believes that the country loses £107 million a year due to flooding, a figure that could rise in future as Jakarta sinks further and sea levels continue to rise.
Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto agrees that the project’s hefty cost is a necessary expense to address geological concerns on Java’s north coast.
He recently told a seminar: “The Netherlands did the same thing, and it took them 40 years.
“The challenge is to have political leaders who can think ahead and use all their resources for 40 to 50 years.”
But critics have argued that the government is not doing enough to address the underlying issues causing the flooding.
Elisa Sutanudjaja, the executive director of Rujak Center for Urban Studies, said government officials aren’t doing anything to prevent groundwater extraction.
She told BenarNews: “They don’t talk at all about how to stop subsidence, it is as if there was a hidden agenda.”
Jakarta sits on the island of Java, one of the largest in Indonesia. This century, it has been hit by several large floods, most recently in 2020 which claimed the lives of 48 people and left thousands more displaced.
