Country planning £30 billion relocation of capital city may be forced to cancel idea

What is a nation supposed to do when their capital city, home to over 10 million people, starts sinking into the swampy land it's built upon?

It's an issue that isn't facing many nations, but for Indonesia it's a very real prospect.

Their capital city of Jakarta is steadily sinking and climate change means that the Java Sea could eventually overrun the Indonesian capital.

Obviously, the country needs a capital city and more than 10 million people need a place to live that isn't the world's fastest sinking city.

Experts predict that by 2050 up to a third of Jakarta could be submerged, and where once that was a far off year of hypothetical proportions we're now basically halfway there since the turn of the millennium.

Jakarta is the world's fastest sinking city, and by 2050 a third of it could be submerged. (Garry Andrew Lotulung/Anadolu via Getty Images)

As such, Indonesia has decided to move their capital city to the island of Borneo and they're intending to spend £30 billion on building a new capital from scratch.

They're hoping to construct a 'sustainable forest city' that will be carbon neutral by 2045 and building of this is currently underway, having begun in 2022.

That all sounds pretty expensive, but the pollution and damage being done by Jakarta sinking is already costing around £3.5 billion a year, so switching to a more solid and environmentally friendly capital will likely save money in the long run.

However, plans to move the capital from Jakarta to Nusantara have hit the snag that many big projects suffer from, it's taking more time and money than anticipated.

The head and deputy of the team working on the new city quit recently, which is not a great sign for such a complicated plan.

£30billion plans to build a new capital city elsewhere aren't entirely going to plan. (Edi Ismail/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The current idea is that by 2029, there'll be over a million people living in Nusantara, so we'll see how that goes in time.

Convincing people to move is going to be a tricky idea.

There are several spots around the world where ambitious new building developments were established that ultimately failed to deliver on their promise of a brighter new future.

Sometimes it's a ghost town of tower blocks built too far away from anywhere else to be anything but soulless concrete commuter coffins with nothing enjoyable to do in the area.

At other times there are wildly ambitious attempts to build the city of the future, as Indonesia is doing with Nusantara, only for nobody to move there and thus little reason for people to make a life there.