
Jakarta Is Sinking So Fast, It Could End Up Underwater - prostoalex
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/21/world/asia/jakarta-sinking-climate.html?_r=0
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sathackr
So the city is sinking many inches, even feet per year(due to excessive ground
water withdrawals). With all the problems the city has, how does climate
change(an average sea level rise of a few millimeters per year) even wind up
on the reporters radar?

I'm no denier, but it aggravates me when someone tries to force a connection
to global warming/climate change.

~~~
pje
Sea levels are projected to rise from 0.6 to 6 meters this century. [1] So
while urban sinking is a much bigger immediate threat, climate change will
pose a significant problem in the near future, and—crucially—will affect
_every coastal city in the world_ , not just Jakarta.

[1]: [https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-
level/projection...](https://sealevel.nasa.gov/understanding-sea-
level/projections/empirical-projections)

~~~
mrighele
> Sea levels are projected to rise from 0.6 to 6 meters this century.

I think you mixed up the units, the article says

> 0.2 meters to 2.0 meters (0.66 to 6.6 feet)

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pje
Yes, thank you! I did mix up the units, and I can no longer edit my original
comment :\

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chewz
Entire Indonesia is falling apart. Economic development is terribly slow over
long term and their main export industries (oil, mining, coal and palm oil -
[1]) do not seem to have a future due to underinvestment and drying demand.

Quite sad.. Such a beautiful, diverse country and nice people.

[1]
[https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/idn/#Exports](https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/idn/#Exports)

~~~
averagewall
This is a bit of a nitpick but saying a country has nice people bothers me. It
sounds like an empty platitude when they don't have much else to be proud of.
Do you really mean Indonesians are nicer than people from somewhere else? What
countries don't have nice people?

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robk
Madagascar. Least nice people I've ever encountered

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jpatokal
This sits rather oddly with the fact that the Malagasy are basically a bunch
of Indonesians who landed on an island off the coast of Africa.

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stmfreak
Sea levels have risen a couple millimeters in recent decades, but Jakarta has
sunk (according to this article) 14 feet in some areas. But keep on beating
that climate change drum!

Sea level rise is global, but it seems wherever we can find sinking cities we
get stories about climate change and its relation to rising sea levels.

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Feniks
Yeah Jakarta was founded as the Amsterdam of the East Indies. Sadly Indonesia
doesn't have the near limitless resources of its old colonial owner that keeps
Amsterdam/Holland from sinking.

Climate change is going to hurt the poorer countries the most.

~~~
rsj_hn
Ultimately the resources a nation has are the skills of its people and
political will. No nations resources are limitless, and the Netherlands has
far fewer real resources but much better skills and organizational
capabilities.

The fact that the Netherlands was a former colonial power doesn't give them
any "colony juice" that they can squeeze onto the ground and dams rise up like
apple trees. They still have to design and build the thing given their smarts
and labor, and Indonesia has to design the thing given their smarts and labor.
The only difference is in the pool of available talent and the organizational
abilities of the government to marshall that talent. Given Indonesia's much
larger population and greater abundance of natural resources, it's a joke to
suggest that it has no resources to build a dam whereas a tiny nation with
fewer resources is able to do it. Indonesia's problem is that they are more
corrupt and disorganized, and can't marshall their resources effectively.

~~~
defo_nonconvex
Tiny country by land mass maybe, but you know the Dutch East India Company's
peak market cap was (inflation-adjusted) 8x10^12 USD, right? If you don't
understand the economic impact of early resource abundance, on the ability to
construct education systems, universities, professional organizations,
infrastructure, and industry, and the 'pool of available talent', then pick up
a strategy game.

Otherwise just Rand-ian codswallop.

~~~
rsj_hn
Yes, but those nominal amounts are just paper. They are a mechanism to
marshall labor, nothing more. They don't correspond to real resources. This is
an interesting fallacy -- I remember playing Freeciv, and you would get 1000
coins in the bank, and if you wanted to speed up building of some monument,
you just spend the coins and poof, all these things get built, even if you
don't have the labor or real resources to do it. The world doesn't work like
that. In the real world, if you try to cash out your stock and sell it to
build something without the real resources to do it, all that happens is
inflation goes up. But a country really only has the labor and land and
domestic equipment that it has, and it needs to use that to build all the
dams. You can create paper claims valued at hundreds of trillions of dollars
if you want, but it doesn't add a single hour of manpower to the country.

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blunte
"Nobody here believes in the greater good" \- this, and an apparent basic lack
of education.

Remember that time in western history that we learned of the benefits of
washing hands for disease control? I have witnessed people in Jakarta
regularly urinating into little drainage ditches just a few meters away from
people who were washing their dishes. You could assume they do this because
there are not better places to wash dishes (but if you've ever camped you know
you can "clean" all the surface with dirt/sand and then use a small amount of
less contaminated water to finish the job). You wouldn't assume the guy peeing
had no other options, as there are plenty of corners of garages and sheds
available. So that's one big problem.

From my admittedly limited experiences in Indonesia, I would characterize the
people as positive, reasonably industrious, and friendly. When managed and
directed, they can build massive structures. Jakarta has so many high rise
buildings you would be shocked. But the parts that are not managed are kind of
left unfinished or are poorly finished. Fittings in buildings are irregular or
worse, and spaces just a hand's reach beyond one's property boundary are left
full of trash or even excrement as if it didn't exist. This I cannot
understand. Perhaps it's something to do with a lack of pride (which can be a
positive attribute when compared to societies too full of pride, but which can
also be detrimental at this low extreme).

Some other fascinating examples of strange (and collectively detrimental)
behaviors... there was a stretch of major freeway that had a minimum occupancy
requirement during rush hours. As I understood, you were not allowed to drive
on that stretch at that time with just a single occupant. And during those
times, there were (presumably poorer) people who would stand dangerously close
to traffic, casually waiting for someone to stop and pick them up. They would
be driven to the other end of the zone, paid a small tip, and then deposited
back onto the road. Then they would somehow cross the road and ride back the
other direction. Some women would do this with their small children in tow.
This suggests the level of poverty and (potentially) the lack of opportunity
for some people, but it also demonstrates how plans designed to improve
situations can be hijacked for individual gain. And traffic was so horrendous
that you really can't blame the city for trying that occupancy approach.

I was at a talk given by an engineer who was doing volunteer work to help
communities be aware of floods as they were developing. It was fascinating -
basically analyzing Twitter activity to determine very localized details of
flooding. But during his time there, he observed layers of flood walls built
that should have prevented many floods. He also observed that along these
stone walls, locals had cut openings through them to facilitate easy foot
passage. In case it's not clear from my description, they had cut openings in
flood walls so it would be easier for them to walk. Predictably, during flash
floods, the water would be a meter higher on one side and just POURING through
the man-made openings here and there. Eventually it would equalize, leaving
the entire area flooded. _boggle_

Finally, driving in the higher end shopping areas, it was not too uncommon to
see $140,000 Mercedes AMG G wagons and the occasional Rolls Royce driving
around. My driver explained that some of these people were government
employees, and that it was well-known that government employees would receive
extra payments and lavish gifts for providing beneficial opportunities to
wealthy individuals or businesses. Fortunately that sort of thing doesn't
happen in our developed countries.

There is no clean end to this wall of text.

~~~
cinquemb
I've been living in Jakarta for about a year and a half now, and Id agree with
what you are saying overall.

I think a big problem is that since a lot of the institutions are at the
national level with offices locally (very different from having institutions
organized/with jurisdiction locally and having one or more overarching
above/beside them), such that there's no "competition" over local governance
which would naturally attract/repel people to regions over others based on how
things are run. Which incidentally, seems in line with the pervasiveness of
the corruption.

You just wont get the local office for the national police to care about
people cutting holes in the flood walls, or pretty much anything unless you
pay them.

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mattdeboard
Well actually _adjusts fedora_ rate of sinking is orthogonal to whether it
winds up underwater

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newfoundglory
Well _actually_ , if it sinks slowly enough then people could build sea walls
and so on to keep the water out.

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blunte
But if you see my unfortunately long comment elsewhere, there will be some
locals who will cut holes in your wall to facilitate foot traffic.

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Pica_soO
Best point in time to calculate the settle point of the waterline and develop
new waterfront property. Good point in time for alot of cities at the moment

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imr_
Hence the definition of sinking...

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choward
Good point. The "so fast" part actually means nothing.

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forinti
Maybe they meant it's so fast there's no time to do anything about it.

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DonHopkins
Isn't this old news from 2011?

[http://jakarta.apache.org/](http://jakarta.apache.org/)

