About the Research
This research discusses about opportunities to live on top of
water which is currently developing.It is driven by the collaboration of
scientists and industries rather than by governments. Living
on top of water (floating) is one out of four tacticsthat has
never been considered seriously by scientists and even the IPCC (2014) in
responding to unavoidable sea level rise (SLR). Today 53% of global population
lives in the 4285 coastal cities and half of them are concentrated in 285 large
cities and metropolitan (Barragán and Andrés, 2015) such as Jakarta. Deltares
(2015) placed Jakarta as the second fastest sinking cities after Tokyo, with
mean cumulative subsidence was about 2 meters from 1900-2013 and estimates an
additional subsidence up to 1.8 meters until 2025.
Recent studies on the modelling of coastal
flood in Jakarta demonstrate that in any scenarios, sea level rise in
combination with land subsidence will inundate North Jakarta up to 3 meters
(e.g.Latief et al, 2018) by 2040 and the ocean penetrates the coastal area up
to 10 kilometers in land (Takagi et al 2016) by 2050. The combination of SLR
and land subsidence has impacted 1.6 million population in North Jakarta.
During the high tide season, sea
water floods people’s houses and it infiltrates upward from the cracks in the
house floor during normal season. This affects people’s health as drainage and
sanitation failed to function in this situation. It also inhibits people
livelihoods and other social and economic activities. Land subsidence leave
houses and public facilities continuously sinking unless investment to elevate
the assets can be made earlier. Hence, it is costly for middle-income earners,
and it is an unaffordable investment for those in low-income group.
Instead of thinking creatively out of the
box with a long-term oriented solution to deal with the sea level rise, current
response undertaken by Indonesia’s government is simply through development of
massive giant seawall in Jakarta’s Bay known as National Capital Integrated
Coastal Development (NCICD) Project.
This research,which is led by Universitas
Diponegoro,aims to complement other on-going research program on the technical
aspect of living on the top of water ( www.seacities.org) at Cities Research
Institute, Griffith University. Though technological research of living on top
of water is progressing, the socio-economic aspects of it is under-researched
yet, particularly in Indonesia.
