Jakarta is slowly sinking, which is why the Indonesian president has decided to move his country's capital. He has finally revealed where: to Borneo.
As hurricane Dorian prepares to lash the south-eastern coast of the United States with winds of 200 kilometres per hour, news arrives from Indonesia, in South-East Asia, that the capital will no longer be Jakarta but will be moved to Borneo. The announcement was made by president Joko Widodo, who had already revealed his intention to relocate the capital back in May, without, however, clarifying where.
We now finally know the chosen location: it lies in an area currently covered by forests near the cities of Balikpapan and Samarinda, where the Indonesian government already owns around 180,000 hectares of land. A name has yet to be chosen, but the aim is to transfer offices and institutions there — along with around one and a half million civil servants — by 2024. The question naturally arises: why carry out an operation of this kind, which is expected to cost around 30 billion euros, with 19 per cent drawn from state coffers? Simple: living in Jakarta is no longer sustainable.
Indonesia's current capital is home to around 10 million people, with a further 30 million in the greater metropolitan area. Traffic paralyses the streets on a daily basis, making the air unbreathable. The foundations have been weakened by uncontrolled water extraction, leaving the city more vulnerable to the effects of global warming, in particular rising sea levels: some areas are sinking at a rate of 25 centimetres per year, so much so that nearly half of Jakarta's surface area already lies below sea level. By 2050, around 36 per cent could be submerged, with a peak of 95 per cent in the northern districts. As if that were not enough, due to climate change phenomena such as flooding and tsunamis are becoming increasingly frequent and destructive.
The new capital, by contrast, is situated in a safer and geographically more strategic location, on the eastern coast of Borneo, the third largest island in the world. "In 74 years of independence we had never had the opportunity to choose," commented the Indonesian president, who was re-elected just a few months ago. It now falls to Parliament to approve the relocation.
Criticism has not been lacking, particularly from environmentalists concerned about the fate of the forests currently occupying the site where the new capital will be built — all the more so given that millions of hectares of land have already been cleared to make way for oil palm plantations, to the point that Borneo's orangutan population halved between 1999 and 2015. It does indeed seem contradictory to resort to deforestation in order to escape the effects of climate change, given that forests are fundamental to combating it. Beyond any value judgement, we should regard this as a wake-up call: it is not normal for the absurd to be becoming normal.
Much the same has happened in Texas, in the United States: the government has launched an ambitious project to move coastal roads to higher ground and build a barrier running along 100 kilometres of coastline to protect ecosystems, homes, businesses and… the oil industry. Perhaps we should simply heed the message of Anote Tong who, when he was president of Kiribati — an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean made up of 33 coral atolls and other small islets — had purchased land to give residents the opportunity to build themselves a new home, but above all to issue an appeal to the international community, helpless in the face of what was — and still is — happening to the planet. It is time to act.