“Living here, we don’t have other places to go,” said Yudi and Titi, a young professional couple who one recent Sunday had made the roughly hour’s round trip from western Jakarta to the center of the city just to spend a few minutes walking up and down a chaotic, multilane freeway briefly closed to traffic. A trip to the nearest botanical garden requires the better part of a day in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Today, it is virtually impossible to walk around. Thirteen rivers feed into the city.Īfter independence in 1945, the city began to sprawl. Imagining a tropical Amsterdam, they laid out streets and canals to try to cope with water pouring in from the south, out of the forests and mountains, where rain falls nearly 300 days out of the year. They named it Jayakarta, Javanese for victorious city.ĭutch colonists arrived a century later, establishing a base for the East India territories. Spread along the northwestern coast of Java, this capital of the nation with the world’s largest Muslim population used to be a soggy, bug-infested trading port for the Hindu kingdom of Sunda before local sultans took it over in 1527. Design by Matt Ruby and Rumsey Taylor.Īs far the eye can see, 21st-century Jakarta is a smoggy tangle of freeways and skyscrapers. Graphics by Derek Watkins and Jeremy White. Eventually, barring wholesale change and an infrastructural revolution, Jakarta won’t be able to build walls high enough to hold back the rivers, canals and the rising Java Sea.Īnd even then, of course, if it does manage to heal its self-inflicted wounds, it still has to cope with all the mounting threats from climate change. If it can’t, northern Jakarta, with its millions of residents, will end up underwater, along with much of the nation’s economy. Hydrologists say the city has only a decade to halt its sinking. “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,” as Sidney Jones, the director of the local Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, put it. Conflicts between Islamic extremists and secular Indonesians, Muslims and ethnic Chinese have blocked progress, helped bring down reform-minded leaders and complicated everything that happens here, or doesn’t happen, to stop the city from sinking. Distrust of government is a national condition. Sinking buildings, sprawl, polluted air and some of the worst traffic jams in the world are symptoms of other deeply rooted troubles. And in Jakarta’s case, a tsunami of human-made troubles - runaway development, a near-total lack of planning, next to no sewers and only a limited network of reliable, piped-in drinking water - poses an imminent threat to the city’s survival. Josh Haner/The New York TimesĬlimate change acts here as it does elsewhere, exacerbating scores of other ills. The banks of a murky canal lapped at the trestle of a railway bridge, which, until recently, had arched high over it.ĭredging along the Karang river in North Jakarta.
Not long ago I drove around northern Jakarta and saw teenagers fishing in the abandoned shell of a half-submerged factory. About 40 percent of Jakarta now lies below sea level.Ĭoastal districts, like Muara Baru, near the Blessed Bodega, have sunk as much as 14 feet in recent years. The main cause: Jakartans are digging illegal wells, drip by drip draining the underground aquifers on which the city rests - like deflating a giant cushion underneath it. In fact, Jakarta is sinking faster than any other big city on the planet, faster, even, than climate change is causing the sea to rise - so surreally fast that rivers sometimes flow upstream, ordinary rains regularly swamp neighborhoods and buildings slowly disappear underground, swallowed by the earth. The sea, once far from his doorstep, now looms over the shop. Rasdiono and his daughter at the family’s Blessed Bodega in Jakarta.
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