Jakarta is experiencing land subsidence (sinking) of 1-15 cm per year. In the meantime, the sea level in Jakarta Bay increases as much as 0.57 cm per year. The sinking of the city perpetuates the flooding problem in Jakarta, with 40% of its territory already below sea level.
With a rapidly growing populous of more than 28 million people, Jakarta can be looked at as a case study for the engineering challenges caused by climate change and rapid urbanization. Combined with the fact that the city boasts the world’s most active Twitter concentration, the PetaJakarta.org project is on the leading edge of an emerging class of participatory data collection that has implications far beyond flooding.
The project is a template that can be used in global mega-cities like Shanghai, Dhaka, Mumbai, Bangkok, or even New York City.
