Central Govt Halts Jakarta’s $40 Billion Reclamation Project

Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta– home to 10 million people – is sinking into the sea at between 2.9 and 6.7 inches per year. To save the megacity from drowning: a $40 billion land reclamation and sea wall project estimated to take 30 years to complete. However, today, the central government has decided to suspend its implementation as the viability of the project is now questioned.

Beating land pressures

High land prices, particularly in coastal areas, make reclamation a relatively ‘cheap’ option for many port expansion projects.

Mangroves under threat, Solomon Islands

Conservation of mangroves and associated coastal ecosystems has been identified as a key natural adaptation strategy and mitigation measure to the effects of climate change.

What Will ‘Weather Whiplash’ Mean for California? – the New York Times

Coast Guard Air Station Astoria crew deploys to Russian River during Northern California floods (by by Petty Officer 3rd Class Taylor Bacon CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

California is built upon the great gamble of irrigation. Left alone, much of the land in the Western United States would be inhospitable to teeming cities. But we’re Americans — we couldn’t let the desert stand in our way.

More than a century ago, the United States Bureau of Land Reclamation began taming the water in the West…

Monitoring Mumbai’s Mangroves

In this booming city, India’s largest, mangrove forests have historically been overlooked. Large tracts of them were removed as part of land reclamation projects, and many of the mangroves that remain have become dumping grounds for garbage and targets for developers and squatters.

Beijing highway: $600m road just the start of China’s investments in Caribbean

Stretching some 67 km north to south across Jamaica, the $600m four-lane nicknamed the “Beijing highway, is the single biggest investment by the Chinese in the Caribbean. This project is also prelude of the building of a $1.5bn deep water container port on islands off the south coast ,using dredging and land reclamation to accommodate mega ships coming through the expanded Panama Canal.