Can you imagine your home slowly disappearing in front of your very eyes? Unluckily for me, I don’t have to imagine, as that’s what’s happening right now! Jakarta, home to around 11 million people and one of the world’s most populous cities, is slowly sinking every year by about 1 to 15 cm; that’s about 2.5 meters in 10 years. As the capital city of Indonesia and the largest in Southeast Asia, Jakarta risks losing all the political and economic development it has worked so hard on — possibly by 2050. So, why is this happening? And should we fear for other coastal cities out there?

Already being a port city, Jakarta is known to be very flood-prone. With the increasing land subsidence, rising sea levels, and heavy rainfall, the number of floods per year is likely to increase. Between January 1st and July 15th 2025, the public response system known as CRM recorded around 1,817 flood reports across Jakarta. This flooding problem displaces residents and showcases poor infrastructure in the city. More than 90% of Jakarta’s coastal areas are now below sea level.

Multiple factors are contributing to this problem. From overpopulation to overall rising sea levels, the government has been forced to relocate its capital to a new city. Jakarta is digging itself into a deeper hole — literally — as the extraction of groundwater for clean water is one of the main reasons that the city is sinking. One of Jakarta’s problems lies in the lack of clean surface water. Water pollution, or pollution in general, has been one of the city’s biggest challenges for years. Northeastern student and Jakarta resident, Nayla Zaki, mentioned how “a lot of wastewater, because they’re not managed properly, ends up flowing into agricultural fields, rivers and open drains, which the lower socioeconomic class gets their water from.” One of the main rivers, the Citarum River, is one of the most polluted rivers in the world, and this river makes up 80% of the water that flows through Jakarta’s pipes.

Jakarta, home to around 11 million people and one of the world’s most populous cities, is slowly sinking every year by about 1 to 15 cm; that’s about 2.5 meters in 10 years

Most Indonesians don’t have access to clean piped water, with about 60% of residents using groundwater. Residents rely on this water for drinking, washing, and cooking. As more groundwater is pumped, the land sinks, which leads to land subsidence. The inability to access clean water encourages more people to extract groundwater on their own, from individual residents to larger companies. Ultimately, this results in illegal activities of groundwater extraction. In 2018, the local government inspected around 80 buildings in Central Jakarta, and they found that 33 of them were extracting groundwater illegally.

In an interview with SONDA Internacional, North Jakarta resident Sopiah discussed how she and her family do not have access to running water, as the pipes don’t reach their house, and there are no wells nearby. She then has to buy water from her neighbor, which takes up around 30% of her monthly income. Jakarta resident and environmental engineer, Faiz Hanif, said “the urban growth in the capital city reduces groundwater, as it is essentially breaking the water cycle, which creates a greater loss for the people outside of Jakarta.” The lack of regulations, policy implementations, and overall poor management creates consequences that will eventually spread to other cities and smaller communities.

As people have been doing it for years, groundwater extraction and the use of personal wells will be a hard challenge to overcome. These wells are drilled underground where they then reach an aquifer, a water-bearing rock that transmits the water into the wells. It can then get more water from heavy rain and add water to the porous rock of the aquifer. Since Jakarta gets a lot of heavy rainfall in the year, they aim for continuous access to clean water through these wells, but it is getting increasingly difficult due to growing urbanization (Water Science School, 2019). One of the government’s main goals to make Jakarta a ‘Global City’ is to provide a clean, comfortable, and sustainable environment where clean water access is a priority.

Access to clean water is a human right, and finding solutions to improve people’s lives takes a lot of collaboration and dedication. This discussion is linked to the work that Northeastern’s Engineers Without Borders (EWB) group is focusing on. The mission for this group is to use engineering solutions to aid communities in developing countries and address basic human needs, such as potable water.

EWB’s program in Nakyenyi, Uganda, specifically aims to improve water access in this area by working with the community, coordinating with local contractors and partners, and gaining support from students at Northeastern to help them achieve their goals. Having completed the first few phases, the group is currently working on implementing a new borehole due to setbacks they faced during the second phase of the project. Within the Uganda group, there are subgroups to allocate tasks and responsibilities of the program: Pipes and fittings, boreholes and hydraulics to tank stands, distribution systems and hydraulics to tap stands, tank stand design, and elevation data analysis. These subgroups collaborate and discuss their ideas in order to contribute to the group’s main goals.

Understanding why communities need support is important. Places such as Jakarta, which is densely populated, have similar issues and share similar traits to a place like Nakyenyi, which is smaller in scale. We can compare the technical systems that they have in place and how they can be applied to different places around the world. Fundamentally, diversifying our knowledge of different communities and the solutions to their problems could be vital for future advancements, learning from mistakes, or building on current systems.

Water accessibility is a major issue and a challenging problem to tackle. Organizations like EWB are taking essential steps to address this issue, and increased awareness and involvement could make a huge difference in progress.