The north coast of Java is sinking, and the sea is rising. In Jakarta, a city of more than 10 million, as much as 40 percent of the land is below sea level
. But Demak Regency, the county that includes Timbulsloko, is one of the hardest hit parts of the coast. While global warming is causing sea levels worldwide to rise around an eighth of an inch a year, the land here is sinking as much as four inches annually. Demak is losing more than a thousand acres of land, about half a percent of its area, to the Java Sea each year.
After the funeral, the villagers pleaded with the Demak government for help. In the fall, the local public works department sent workers with a backhoe, who scraped enough mud off the shallow seafloor to raise the whole cemetery five feet. That will buy the living and the dead in Timbulsloko a little more time.Demak Regency today has 1.2 million inhabitants, a small fraction of Jakarta’s population.
Yet the flooding also threatened modern cities. In the late 19th century, the Dutch built canals, levees, and sluice gates as flood controls in every major city on the Java deltas, especially in Jakarta and Semarang, the capital of Central Java. For more than a decade, the local government has promoted groundwater extraction as the cheapest way to meet the pressing demand for drinking water and sanitation. With groundwater, there’s no need to build dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and complex water treatment systems—it doesn’t require treatment. But using it here still exacts a high price.
“Of course we hope that the government can provide a tap water network to prevent the sinking” of the land, Munawir says. “But it will also kill the already established local water business.” “We have yet to feel the impact of this coastal engineering,” says Fadholi, a 36-year-old fisherman hired by an NGO to maintain the sediment trap in Bedono, another village in Sayung district. “We haven’t seen sediment build up here because the current keeps washing it away.” The fences do act as breeding grounds for green mussels, however, which locals collect and sell.
The national government, as part of a strategic effort to save vital assets and industrial zones, is building a combined highway and sea wall from Semarang to the town of Demak, a distance of some 17 miles. It’s expected to be finished in 2024 at a cost of $532 million. The bad news: Only small portions of two villages in Sayung’s coastal area will be protected.
Kusmantri has lived in this hamlet all of his life, and he desperately wants to move out. He has raised the floor of his house three times since 2013, a total of five feet, but seawater keeps coming in during the highest tides. Apart from a wooden bed frame and a small side table to hold his TV, the place is relatively empty. The green paint on the cracked walls has started to peel off, exposing the bare cement.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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