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Rising sea levels threaten 23 million in Indonesia's coastal cities by 2050: Study
Jakarta, which is the country’s capital and home to a population of 10 million, is expected to be particularly vulnerable to coastal flooding, threatening the already sinking city, which has many other urban problems on its hands.
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A map showing coastal areas of Indonesia's (in red) at risk of inundation by coastal flooding by 2050 as a result of rising sea levels caused by climate change (Climate Central/-)
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round 23 million people living in several of Indonesia’s coastal cities, including the capital Jakarta, risk having their homes inundated in coastal flooding by 2050 as a result of rising sea levels caused by climate change, a new report has warned.
Those forecast to find themselves in flood zones in the archipelago are among 300 million citizens facing the risk globally in the next three decades ─ three times as many people as previously predicted, according to the study.
A report by United States-based nonprofit research group Climate Central estimates that Indonesia, together with five other Asian countries, will be heavily impacted by the sea level rise, given the number of people living in each country’s low-lying coastal areas.
“Mainland China, Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand are home to the most people on land projected to be below average annual coastal flood levels by 2050,” the report says.
“Together, those six nations account for roughly 75 percent of the 300 million people on land facing the same vulnerability at midcentury.”
The new figures are based on CoastalDEM, a new digital elevation model developed by Climate Central, which used machine learning to correct systematic errors in the elevation dataset used in previous coastal flood risk assessments, NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).
The new dataset used in the study is “more accurate” than the SRTM, which according to the research group, has underestimated the figure of future inundation as a result of rising sea levels in the coming decades.
