Asia-Pacific, Climate Change, Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines

CLIMATE CHANGE-THAILAND: Submergence – Grim Reality for Coastal Folk

Marwaan Macan-Markar

KHUN SAMUTCHINE, May 3 2007 (IPS) - The sound of waves from the nearby sea is no comfort for the chief abbot of the Buddhist temple in this fishing village in the Gulf of Thailand.

It is a constant reminder of the peril that awaits the temple, Wat Khun Samuttrawachine, built in 1967, from an encroaching sea. ‘’This temple is always under threat from the sea; during the monsoon it is worse,” says Phra Somnuk Atipanyo in a quiet tone.

Visible from the entrance of the decaying temple is a stark image that affirms his fears are not out of place. Rows of telephone and electricity poles stick out of the waters and disappear into the distance along the coast as testimony to there having once been a road that ran through this village. The sea began to swallow it more than two decades ago.

Beyond the cement poles are others relics of a community that once occupied the flat terrain. They include the water tank that once serviced a primary school for 300 children. Single-engine boats now scour the area for plankton to be used for making ‘kapi,’ a prawn paste popular in Thai cuisine.

The temple in this village, a one-hour drive south of Bangkok, has become the last line of defence in an environmental tussle where the sea has been winning, metre by metre. The wooden homes of the fisher folk that once stood on either side of the temple, set in the midst of a sparse mangrove and mud-flats, have been removed. Fishermen like Prawit Inouam, 37, now live more than one km inland.

‘’We are seeing our village and community disappear,” says Prawit who has had to move three times inland to escape sea erosion, the first when he was only three years old. ‘’We need to protect this area to reduce the impact of more sea erosion.”

It is a view echoed by other men and women who make up the 105 families that continue to brave the sea and live in Khun Samutchine. Two decades ago, some 200 households were part of this community.

Stalling further loss of land to the sea by building a barrier of cement pillars as a breakwater and a wall is a daunting prospect. So, too is the hope of fishermen like Suwan Buaphai of restoring the protective mangroves that once grew here.

‘’The rate of erosion in this area is ‘’the most rapid in Thailand,” says Tara Buakamsri, climate and energy campaigner for the South-east Asia office of Greenpeace, the global green lobby. ‘’It is 25-30 m per year.”

The area’s struggles against the sea have been brought into focus this week due to a major international conference on climate change being held in Bangkok. The plight of low-lying coastal communities across the world that face submersion is one among a range of environmental issues being discussed at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ICCP), the premier United Nations body on global warming.

Thailand’s 2,666 km-long coastline on the Gulf of Thailand in the east and along the Andaman Sea on the west has 30 such environmental ‘’hot spots,” says Thanawat Jarupongsakul, an associate professor in the department of geology at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. ‘’Of these there are 22 in the Gulf of Thailand, and the Khun Samutchine area is the worst-hit.”

”Nearly 600 km of Thailand’s coastline, or about 21 percent, has been lost due to sea erosion,” he told IPS. ‘’Climate change is one reason, since it has resulted in more intense waves and rougher seas during the monsoon period.”

During the north-east monsoon, which begins in November and lasts through February, the average height of waves had normally been between one to 1.5 m, he recalls. ‘’But now it has increased to between two and four m high.”

The areas worst affected by sea erosion have seen more than 25 m of land being lost to the sea every year, reveals a study produced by a team of Thai experts, including Thanawat, which was released last year. Most of these coastlines located along the upper half of the Gulf, close to the Samut Prakan province where Khun Samutchine is located.

On Tuesday, this South-east Asian nation’s meteorological department issued a warning to communities living along the Gulf of Thailand that lent weight to the view about increasingly erratic weather patterns. An active low-pressure area in the Gulf had acquired strength to trigger a storm the likes of which has not been seen in four decades, warned Supareuk Tansiratanawong, the met chief, according to ‘The Nation’ newspaper.

This village’s struggle to exist has been worsened by other factors too, says Thanawat. They include the dense mangroves that offered a protective wall along the coast being cut to make way for shrimp farming and the lack of sand flowing down the nearby Chao Phraya river to the coast due to large dams built upstream. ‘’Upstream dams have caused sediments to drop by 70 percent.”

Environmentalists, however, are confident that eco-friendly measures being designed to contend with the storm surges during the monsoons, including a drainage and pumping system to ‘’manage the land margin in order to stabilise the seashore,” could protect this village.

And Wat Khun Samuttrawatchine, which stands nearly two m above ground, is on the frontline of this challenge. ‘’We want the temple to remain here; not move,” says Phra Somnuk.