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Jakarta Is Running on a Countdown, Not a Clock

Roughly 40% of Jakarta now sits below sea level.

The cause is not primarily the ocean. Sea level around Jakarta is rising by about 3 to 4 millimetres a year, which is serious but slow. The land is going down far faster. Northern Jakarta has been subsiding by up to 25 centimetres a year — in places more — and has dropped around 2.5 metres in a decade.

The mechanism is the same one operating under Mexico City: groundwater extraction. Piped water reaches only about 40% of Jakarta's population, so millions of people draw from wells, thousands of them unregulated, and the aquifer beneath the city compacts as it empties. The city sinks into the space where its own water used to be.

The projections are stark. Various studies suggest a quarter to a third of Jakarta could be underwater by 2050. A giant sea wall project has been repeatedly delayed and is not now expected before 2030 or later. In some places the existing wall already sits below the level it was built to hold back.

In 2019 President Joko Widodo announced that Indonesia would move its capital. The new city, Nusantara, is being built in East Kalimantan on Borneo, roughly 1,200 kilometres away, with a target completion date of 2045 — the centenary of Indonesian independence. Around US$4.7 billion was spent between 2022 and 2024. Jakarta remains the country's commercial and financial centre, and around 30 million people still live in the greater metropolitan area.

The clock: every other city in this series has an argument about what time it is. Jakarta's numbers are all dates.

2030 for the sea wall. 2045 for the new capital. 2050 for the water. These are the figures that actually govern the city, and none of them is on a clock face.

It is worth saying plainly: moving the seat of government does not change the physics under North Jakarta. The people living in Pluit will still be there, and the ground will still be going down, whatever the calendar in Nusantara says.

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