Rising water levels threaten Indonesia's Jakarta

FRANCE 24 English

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00:00Jakarta and its 10 million inhabitants are living on borrowed time.

00:05The Indonesian capital, much of which is below sea level, is sinking.

00:10We're now three, four metres below sea level.

00:13You can see here that the house actually is the seawall.

00:16If you just go around, you can see these houses are completely integrated into the seawall.

00:21Victor, a Dutch engineer, has overseen the construction of a huge network of dikes around Jakarta.

00:28This seawall is 32 kilometres long.

00:32Built on unstable ground, the megacity sinks an average of about 10 centimetres every year.

00:39As an engineer, I'm scared.

00:41If this seawall would break, it's a tsunami of water coming in.

00:44That is a direct threat.

00:46This dike is fragile and poorly maintained.

00:49The sea seeps in beneath its foundations, meaning it could collapse at any moment.

00:54Despite the dangers, local residents seem resigned to their fate.

00:59We're used to it, so we're not afraid.

01:01Besides, we don't have a choice. My work is here. I take tourists on boat rides.

01:09Tiara Salsabila was born in one of the areas threatened by rising water levels.

01:14To try to spare her neighbourhood, she became a civil engineer.

01:17Her goal is to build higher and more resistant dikes.

01:22Without new infrastructure, there is no doubt that Jakarta will sink with more and more floods.

01:27So I wanted to get involved in saving the city.

01:32But saving Jakarta is an impossible task.

01:35That's why the government decided to move the Indonesian capital

01:38to a location more than a thousand kilometres away to the island of Borneo.

01:44It's true that a capital city should not sink, so I support this move.

01:49But does that mean the government will completely abandon Jakarta?

01:55In Jakarta, the battle against the sea goes on.

01:58And there's not a moment to waste.

02:01If nothing is done, by 2050 nearly two million people could be displaced.

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