As sea waters slowly rose around his temple and his neighbors fled inland, Thai abbot Somnuek Atipanyo refused to budge and is today a symbol of the fight to restore the country’s fast-eroding coastlines.
A dangerous combination of climate change, industrial farming and rapid urbanization are endangering the Gulf of Thailand’s coasts, stripping away precious mangrove trees and leaving some buildings like Somnuek’s surrounded by sea water.
In the 30 years since the waters started encroaching, most of his neighbors in the fishing village of Samut Chin moved several hundred meters inland to rebuild their wooden homes.
Photo: AFP
Standing in his saffron robes near his monastery on stilts — dubbed the “floating temple” — the 51-year-old monk points out to sea at the spot where the local school once stood.
“This temple used to be in the middle of the village,” he says referring to Samut Chin, about an hour south of Bangkok.
“If we moved it, people wouldn’t even know there had ever been one here,” he says of the temple, accessible only by a small footbridge today.
These shores were once protected by extensive mangrove forests — the Gulf of Thailand boasts some of the largest in the world — a natural defense against coastal erosion thanks to their extensive roots that stabilize the shoreline.
But it’s a been a losing battle to preserve them.
REPLANTING IN THE ‘HEART’
Mangrove forests have been cleared for extensive development of shrimp and salt farms, along with new houses and hotels that have popped up thanks to a development boom in recent decades.
Thailand lost almost one-third of its vast coastal mangrove forests between 1961 and 2000, according to a report from the nation’s Department of Marine and Coastal Resources and the UN Environment Programme.
Climate change is also having an impact: stronger waves and more ferocious monsoons have wiped out mangroves in the Gulf of Thailand, which is especially vulnerable because its waters are so shallow.
“The waves and tides are higher than before,” says Thanawat Jarupongsakul, who advises Thailand’s government on its policy to combat erosion.
Asian and Caspian coastlines are the two areas in the world most affected by coastal erosion, according to a study published last year in the scientific journal Nature.
It’s a global problem: tens of thousands of square kilometers of land have been lost from coastal erosion around the world — between 1984 and 2015 the equivalent of the surface area of Haiti was lost, the study said.
In Thailand, a quarter of the country’s shores — or about 700km — are eroding, some “severely,” according to data shared by the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources.
Now there is a push to restore Thailand’s precious mangrove ecosystem through a national voluntary tree replanting scheme, including near Somnuek’s island monastery.
On a recent sunny afternoon, scores of people spent the day wading chest-deep in the sea to replant mangrove trees.
Clad in headscarves and hats, they gingerly reach down into the water to plant young saplings along lines of bamboo poles that help offer some protection against the waves.
“This project is called ‘Planting a forest in people’s hearts,’” says Wason Ditsuwan, who runs the program.
Set up in 2016 by Bangkok city authorities, the project has so far replanted 34 hectares of mangroves across the country.
TEMPLE SELFIES
Wason is hoping his project will succeed where others have failed.
Nearly ten years ago, government adviser Thanawat helped residents in Samut Chin replant mangrove trees but some areas were too far gone to recover.
“Even if you plant a lot of mangroves, it cannot help,” he says.
Another strategy is to drill pylons of cement into the seabed — and on the shoreline itself — to act as a substitute for the mangrove roots.
This has proven successful so far in the tourist town of Pattaya farther along the coast, where the pylons have helped to reclaim several meters of beach.
But it’s a race to keep up with rapid development along the shore, Thanawat says.
As for Somnuek’s stretch of coast, though further erosion has stopped for now, there is little hope his temple will ever see dry ground again.
But the flooding has brought one unexpected advantage: dozens of tourists that flock to the so-called floating temple for Instagram-worthy selfies.
“The fight against coastal erosion has brought fame,” village head Wisanu Kengsamut says.
The latest military exercises conducted by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) last week did not follow the standard Chinese Communist Party (CCP) formula. The US and Taiwan also had different explanations for the war games. Previously the CCP would plan out their large-scale military exercises and wait for an opportunity to dupe the gullible into pinning the blame on someone else for “provoking” Beijing, the most famous being former house speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. Those military exercises could not possibly have been organized in the short lead time that it was known she was coming.
From an anonymous office in a New Delhi mall, matrimonial detective Bhavna Paliwal runs the rule over prospective husbands and wives — a booming industry in India, where younger generations are increasingly choosing love matches over arranged marriage. The tradition of partners being carefully selected by the two families remains hugely popular, but in a country where social customs are changing rapidly, more and more couples are making their own matches. So for some families, the first step when young lovers want to get married is not to call a priest or party planner but a sleuth like Paliwal with high-tech spy
When Portugal returned its colony Macao to China in 1999, coffee shop owner Daniel Chao was a first grader living in a different world. Since then his sleepy hometown has transformed into a bustling gaming hub lined with glittering casinos. Its once quiet streets are now jammed with tourist buses. But the growing wealth of the city dubbed the “Las Vegas of the East” has not brought qualities of sustainable development such as economic diversity and high civic participation. “What was once a relaxed, free place in my childhood has become a place that is crowded and highly commercialized,” said Chao. Macao yesterday
The world has been getting hotter for decades but a sudden and extraordinary surge in heat has sent the climate deeper into uncharted territory — and scientists are still trying to figure out why. Over the past two years, temperature records have been repeatedly shattered by a streak so persistent and puzzling it has tested the best-available scientific predictions about how the climate functions. Scientists are unanimous that burning fossil fuels has largely driven long-term global warming, and that natural climate variability can also influence temperatures one year to the next. But they are still debating what might have contributed to this
RSS