Urban land subsidence
node
The sinking of the ground under a city, most often because water is being pumped out of the sediments beneath it faster than it is replaced, compacting them irreversibly. It is the adaptation problem that is routinely mistaken for a sea-level problem: in many delta cities the ground is falling several times faster than the sea is rising, so relative sea level at the coast is dominated by the local term rather than the global one. Jakarta is the most-cited case, with recent assessments giving a citywide average around three and a half centimetres a year and considerably more in the north; Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Manila, Semarang and parts of the Chinese coast show the same mechanism. The causal chain runs straight back through this Journey: where a piped network does not reach households and businesses, they sink boreholes; the aquifer draws down; the ground compacts; the flood defences have to be raised; and the cost of the missing water network is paid, with interest, as a coastal engineering bill.
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Timeline
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Connections · 2
- Jakartaaffects
- Urban water supply and sanitationcaused_by
Assembled narrative · 1
Assembled from 22 blocks · 1 evidence · 27 related
- Story
- The sinking of the ground under a city, most often because water is being pumped out of the sediments beneath it faster than it is replaced, compacting them irreversibly. It is the adaptation problem that is routinely mistaken for a sea-level problem: in many delta cities the ground is falling several times faster than the sea is rising, so relative sea level at the coast is dominated by the local term rather than the global one. Jakarta is the most-cited case, with recent assessments giving a citywide average around three and a half centimetres a year and considerably more in the north; Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Manila, Semarang and parts of the Chinese coast show the same mechanism. The causal chain runs straight back through this Journey: where a piped network does not reach households and businesses, they sink boreholes; the aquifer draws down; the ground compacts; the flood defences have to be raised; and the cost of the missing water network is paid, with interest, as a coastal engineering bill.
- Knowledge
- Urban water supply and sanitation
- Jakarta
- Urban land subsidence
- Connections
- Nusantara
- Jakarta
- Urban water supply and sanitation
- Degree of Urbanisation
- Urban land subsidence
- Indonesia announces the capital move to East Kalimantan
- World Urbanization Prospects 2025 changes the measurement
- Urban dedensification
- Municipal fiscal capacity
- Lagos
- NEWater
- Urban land subsidence
- The JMP reports flat urban water coverage
- Evidence
- Supports the citywide subsidence average of around 3.5 centimetres a year with faster rates in North Jakarta, groundwater abstraction as the principal driver, and the partially built north-coast sea wall running years behind schedule. V55 verification basis: national reporting plus a peer-reviewed abstract; neither the article nor the underlying geodetic dataset was opened, and rates vary substantially by site and technique.
Observed changes · 0
No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.
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