Jakarta to sinking as a result of climate change but also conflict (Photo)

Rasdiono recalls the sea distance he had with his doorstep under a hill. At that time he opened a narrow hut, where he and his family sold the heads of the mustard, eggs, and fried chicken.

It was weird, Rasdiono said. Each year the water rose closer. The hill gradually disappeared. The sea now narrowed over the store, just a few steps away, held by a wall.

With climate change, the Java Sea is growing and time is becoming more extreme, reports “York Times”, Transmission Periscope. Earlier this month, a strange storm briefly turned Jakarta's roads into rivers.

A local climate researcher, Irwan Pulugan, an adviser to the city governor, fears temperatures could rise several degrees of Fahrenheit and sea level rise to as much as three metres in the region during the next century.

But global warming proved to be not the only blame after the historic floods that engulfed Rasdio and most of the rest of Jakarta's hut in 2007. The problem, it turned out, was that the city itself is sinking.

In fact, Jakarta is sinking faster than any other large city on the planet faster, even more quickly, than climate change is causing the sea level to rise, rivers sometimes flow upstream, ordinary rains flood neighborhoods, and buildings slowly disappear underground, swallowed up by land.

About 40 per cent of Jakarta now stand below sea level.

Coastal circles, such as Muera Baru, near the blessed Bodeges, have sunk up to 14m in recent years.

Conflicts between Islamic extremists and secular Indonesians, Muslims and ethnic Chinese have blocked progress, helped bring down reformed leaders and complicated everything that happens here, or doesn't happen, to prevent the city from falling apart.

Hidrologists say the town has only a decade to stop sinking it. If it can't, northern Jakarta, with millions of its inhabitants, will end up underwater, along with much of the country's economy.

These factories also throw tons of waste and chemicals on waterways, polluting the city's water supply.

Tokyo was in a similar situation after World War II. It had sunk some 40 feet [12 m] since 1900. But the city poured resources into new infrastructure and created stricter rules about development, and within a decade or two made itself a global model of urban innovation, more capable of facing the effects of climate change.

“Jakarta could become a version of Tokyo's 21st century in the 20th century, an example for urban redeveloping”, Iwan Pulugan, thought, adviser to changing the climate of the city's new governor.

Like Tokyo half a century ago, Jakarta is at a turning point, he said: “Nature won't wait in”./Periscopi/