JAKARTA • Mr Rasdiono remembers when the sea was a good distance from his doorstep, down a hill. Back then he opened the cramped, gaily painted bayside shack he named the Blessed Bodega, where he and his family sell catfish heads, spiced eggs and fried chicken.
It was strange, Mr Rasdiono said. Year by year, the water crept closer. The hill gradually disappeared. Now the sea loomed high over the shop, just steps away, held back only by a leaky wall.
With climate change, the Java Sea is rising and weather in Jakarta is becoming more extreme. Earlier this month, another freakish storm briefly turned the Indonesian capital's streets into rivers and brought this vast area of nearly 30 million residents to a virtual halt.
Global warming turned out not to be the only culprit behind the historic floods that overran Mr Rasdiono's bodega and much of the rest of Jakarta in 2007. The problem, it turned out, was that the city itself is sinking.
In fact, Jakarta is sinking faster than any other big city on the planet, faster, even, than climate change is causing the sea to rise - so surreally fast that rivers sometimes flow upstream, ordinary rain regularly swamps neighbourhoods and buildings slowly disappear underground, swallowed by the earth.
The main cause: Jakartans are digging illegal wells, drip by drip draining the underground aquifers on which the city rests - like deflating a giant cushion underneath it.
About 40 per cent of Jakarta now lies below sea level.
Coastal districts, like Muara Baru, near the Blessed Bodega, have sunk as much as 4.26m in recent years.
A tsunami of human-made troubles - runaway development, a near-total lack of planning, next to no sewers and only a limited network of reliable, piped-in drinking water - poses an imminent threat to the city's survival.
Hydrologists say the city has only a decade to halt its sinking. If it cannot, northern Jakarta, with its millions of residents, will end up underwater, along with much of the nation's economy.
The most urgent problems are in North Jakarta, a coastal mash-up of ports, nautically themed high-rises, aged fish markets, abject slums, power plants, giant air-conditioned malls and the congested remnants of the colonial Dutch settlement, with its decrepit squares and streets of crumbling warehouses and dusty museums.
Mr Ardhasena Sopalheluwakan is among the climate scientists here who think the best approach is "to give back part of North Jakarta to nature". The idea would be to "reintroduce mangroves and rejuvenate some of the dozens of reservoirs that were actually part of old Jakarta".
Mr Irvan Pulungan, the climate change adviser to the city's new governor, said: "Jakarta could become a 21st-century version of Tokyo in the 20th century, an example for urban redevelopment."
And like Tokyo half a century ago, Jakarta is at a turning point, he said: "Nature will no longer wait."
NYTIMES
