Jakarta Flood Resilience

Adapting with the water, not against it

In Jakarta's low-lying informal settlements, flooding is a near-monthly fact of life. This project works street by street with the communities most exposed to it, combining detailed hydrological modelling with the local knowledge of residents who have adapted to rising water for generations.

By bringing those two perspectives together, the team helps neighbourhood planners test where drainage, raised walkways, and small green buffers will do the most good. The aim is practical: adaptation measures a community can build, maintain, and trust, backed by evidence that holds up at the city scale.

Mapping is only the start. Working sessions with residents, ward officials, and engineers turn the model's outputs into choices people can act on, surfacing the constraints that data alone misses, from land tenure to who maintains a pump once the project ends.

What emerges is a portfolio of small, layered measures rather than a single large defence, each one affordable, locally owned, and sized to the street it protects. Tracked over successive wet seasons, they build a picture of what genuinely reduces risk, and what only moves the water somewhere else.