Save Sinking Jakarta!

[Peaceful music] The tidal flooding started to enter our village about 20 years ago. Before that, there was no flooding coming into the village. There used to be rice fields all over the place. The seashore used to be far less inland. All I can do is just crying and feel sad when thinking about the waves, the wind and rain that came all at the same time. The floods are getting worse and worse, we cannot go anywhere. We are stranded in the middle of the village while the water level keeps rising. Villagers activities have become strenuous because of the floods. Assistance has been provided by the government, such as roads and 1200 meters long hard structure built by MIMAF in 2011. However, these are not effective on their own and have also collapsed in places. The waves still flood our village. In the 70s until 1985, when the seashore condition was still good, with a lot of mangroves, not being cut down, the distance between the seashore to our hamlet Bogorame was approximately 2 kilometers. But now it is all gone. "[Music] {Hybrid Engineering- Building with Nature} " Indonesia, is an archipelago with a population of more than 230 million people, and most of the population lives in coastal areas. Mangrove ecosystems are a key support factor for food security, protecting us against strong winds, floods and even tsunamis to some extent. [Music] So we know that climate change will bring sea level rise and also it will bring more extreme events. That can be more rain or less rain in terms of drought or extreme and less predictable events. The areas that are most vulnerable are those areas near deltas and coasts. And exactly those areas also have a lot of people because more than half of the world population will be in coastal and delta areas. So, it is clear that climate change will brings high risks for coastal communities and local communities. [Music] Mangrove forests play a vital role in maintaining the balance of coastal areas. Shoreline erosion and accretion happen naturally along with the change of seasons. This situation no longer occurs in the north coast of Java as mangroves and coastal vegetation are disturbed. [Music] Mangroves also play an important role as carbon sinks, vitals for mitigating climate change. The carbon accumulation in mangrove forests is 10 times higher than in any other ecosystem on the mainland. More than 22.6 percent of mangrove forests in the world are located in Indonesia with 3 million hectares of mangrove forests. but in the last three decades, Indonesia lost more than 2.7 million hectares of its mangrove forests. [Music] In Demak district, the extensive conversion of mangrove forests to acquaculture has brought a disaster for coastal communities. Like currently happened in Timbul Sloko village. Timbul Sloko village used to be fertile and prosperous village. Peaceful, prosperous and fertile! Fertile rice plants, plenty of crops, abundant coconuts. Harvest from rice farming and fisheries are plenty. People who stay here sometimes say that it was a decade of cheap food and cheap clothing. [Music] So a really long time ago, way out there towards the coast when the coast was still not eroded it used to be mangroves over there. And this area was agricultural land. So, these people were farmers. And then in 1970s 80s 90s there was a huge boom of acquaculture for shrimp and people started making acquaculture ponds here. First at a small pace and it became bigger and bigger and bigger. And this whole place became acquaculture. Now what happened is that the use of those acquaculture ponds was unsustainable. So it resulted in degraded landscape with abandoned ponds and also even erosion. So these people are facing an identity crisis. Its really a tragedy. So, if you look at those houses there, you see bricks and piles of rocks everywhere because people need to rebuild their house constantly, they need to renovate it. The flood is coming in really into the village and people need to clean their homes and sometimes even replace entire houses. Its very tragic. The damage in the North coast of Java is urgent. We need immediate action to restore the ecosystem functions that have been lost. Timbul Sloko village is one of the villages that shows the environmental degradation in the norther coast of Java. Seashore setback is pretty significant in the last 3-4 decades. Immediate action is very important. [Music] Timbul Sloko is suffering from really severe erosion. So we literally see hundreds of meters or upto a kilometer of coastaline has disappeared. There is several reasons for that. So, sea level is rising, the land is subsiding and people have been making acquaculture ponds. And in response of initial erosion, people started putting hard structures like concrete wave breakers, these are only short-term solutions. Because in the long term they make it worse. The wave height will increase, eroding forces will increase while at the same time it is blocking sediment to come in. One of the reasons is that the mangrove have disappeared and we know that mangroves have strong coastal protection fucntion. Because of their roots they can attenuate waves and they can grab and capture sediments. So we were thinking how can we bring this function back again here. So what we need to do here is restore the sediment balance so that there is enough mud for the mangroves to come back. Once the mangroves are back they can have coastal protection function again. We call that building with nature. So we integrate natural elements with more traditional solutions. In some case those solutoins can be quite low tech. Like here, we are introducing these permeable structures or permeable dams. This was actually inspired by solution that we in the Netherlands, applied for over a century but with salt marshes. So, we worked in the Netherlands in an area that was also suffering from erosion and land was lost. And people reclaimed the land just by bilding these structures. [Music] Hopefully we can secure Bogorame area or Timbul Seloko, so it will be safe forever. People are expecting that the permeable dams can bear up against the tidal waves, so that they do not enter the human settlements and villagers can feel secure and do not worry by thoughts of moving into another village.So this village can sustain as it once was. I am also very happy, hopefully in the future if there are rains, the flood will not come again. If Allah wants it, hopefully! This project in Timbul Sloko is a promising pilot project which focused on reclaiming the land and restoring the mangrove belt through Building with nature. To ensure the sustainability of the initiative, the next step is to embed the approach in policy and planning. For this, we would like to work with the communities, government, private sector and civil society, on a Master Plan for the area. This plan should address all the root causes to coastal vulnerability, sustainable land use and finance options to ensure the long-term maintenance of a coastline and itse ecossytem services. Our dream is to bring this project to the next phase and also to replicate this model in rural and urban coastlines in indonesia and beyond. It is very promising to see that Timbul Sloko has decided to protect 100 hectares of mangrove forest and that two neighboring villages are in the same process, [Musci] acknowledgement [Music] logo