With a population of over 30 million, Jakarta sits on a low, flat alluvial plain in Indonesia. Much of the city is already located below sea level and predicted sea level rise, combined with sinking due to the composition and geology of the city’s foundation will compound frequent and intensifying flooding. A working paper, “Sea Level Rise and Urban Adaptation in Jakarta,” presented at the inaugural MIT Asia Real Estate Initiative Symposium (AREIS), explored how policy prescriptions and government interventions might help Jakarta navigate this existential threat.
The paper’s author and presenter, Allan Hsiao, is an assistant professor at Princeton University. Hsiao’s research examines questions in environmental and development economics using tools from empirical industrial organization.
The symposium, hosted at MIT in the summer of 2023, is an element of the MIT Center for Real Estate (MIT/CRE)’s Asia Real Estate Initiative. This initiative provides a platform for academic and professional collaboration to center sustainability in Asian real estate development, management and investment.
Image Source: Earth.org
