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August 27, 2019 08:45 pm

Jakarta Has Sunk By Up To 4 Meters, Forcing Indonesia To Build a New Capital

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Yesterday, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced a plan to move the country's capital from Jakarta to a new location in Borneo. The reason? Jakarta is bursting at the seams -- and sinking. Different sections of the city -- home to 10 million people within an urban area of 30 million -- are subsiding at different rates, but most fall in the range of 3 to 10 centimeters every year. Over the years, that has added up to as much as four meters of surface elevation change. This has wreaked havoc on building foundations and other infrastructure. And as Jakarta sits on the coast, where a number of small rivers meet the sea, the flooding hazard is also real. (The fact that sea level is rising doesn't help.) That includes high-tide seawater flooding but also stormwater flooding as rain captured by the sprawling city's pavement struggles to drain seaward. Indonesia's plan is to start a new capital city in an undeveloped portion of the East Kalimantan province of Borneo. Reuters reports that President Widodo's goal is to begin relocating the 1.5 million civil servants working in Jakarta in 2024 -- an endeavor that would cost around US$33 billion overall.

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