40% Of Jakarta Below Sea Level; Pumping Draining Aquifer, Making It Fastest-Sinking City On Earth

[hatrack]

AKARTA — The Waladuna mosque is submerged in a meter of seawater, about 3 feet deep. It’s low tide in northern Jakarta. During high tide, the water creeps up to the moss- and seaweed-covered roof of the abandoned mosque, a building that has become a symbol of Jakarta’s direst problem. Children play on top of the 4-meter (13-foot) concrete barrier that was built next to the mosque to temporarily halt the advance of the Java Sea. A man fishes from a pile of rocks next to the inundated building, which dates back to the 1980s, when sea levels were much lower. Scattered nearby are the concrete skeletons of abandoned warehouses and fish factories, long since shut down and a reminder of both a thriving past and a not-so-bright future.

Jakarta is sinking. And it’s doing so at a rate faster than any of the world’s megacities — from 1 centimeter (about half an inch) a year in some areas, up to 20 cm (8 in) in the worst-affected areas, like here in northern Jakarta.

Rising sea levels pose a threat to many coastal cities around the world, with climate change the driving force in most of these cases — from Dhaka and Bangkok in Asia, to Alexandria and Lagos in Africa, to Houston and New Orleans in the U.S. Late last year, exceptionally high tides caused severe flooding in Venice.

Forty percent of Jakarta is already below sea level, but the main reason why the city is sinking is not climate change. Instead, it’s a thirst for clean water. Less than half of the city’s population has access to piped water, leading to a proliferation of wells and pumps, often installed illegally. Over the decades, they’ve depleted the aquifers beneath the city, leading to land subsidence. The city doesn’t actually lack freshwater; annually it has 300 days of rain, and 13 rivers flow through it. The problem is that this water isn’t retained, since areas that used to be marshlands with mangroves have over the years been filled in and paved over to make room for shopping malls and high-rise office and apartment buildings. An estimated 97% of Jakarta’s wetlands have been transformed into concrete jungle.

EDIT

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/04/a-watery-onslaught-from-sea-sky-and-land-in-the-worlds-fastest-sinking-city/

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. Jesus! It's getting so bad, and still so many leaders fiddle.

[Massacure]

2. "...which dates back to the 1980s, when sea levels were much lower."

Sea levels were about 4 inches lower in the 1980s than now. That's not so much the issue as the fact that that Jakarta was 15 to 240 inches (1.25 to 20 feet) higher .