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  Straits Times 25 Jun 07
A land swallowed by the sea

Some 20 million people are close to losing their homes as sea levels rise and weather patterns change, Thailand Correspondent Nirmal Ghosh reports

LIKE lost sentinels, the telephone poles stand in neat rows out at sea, the brown waters of the Gulf of Thailand roiling about them. There are several electricity poles as well, with their cables removed. Occasionally, the roof of a water tank protrudes from the waves. A stone structure stands almost a kilometre out to sea, announcing to boat passengers that they have arrived in Bangkok.

Twenty years ago, it was on dry land. Just like the telephone and electricity poles. The throbbing heart of downtown Bangkok is only about 20km north-east of this lost land in Bang Khun Tien district, where the Abbot of Wat Khun Samut often stands looking out at the hungry sea from behind double barriers of concrete slabs and a rock-pile embankment.

The ground floors of most of the buildings in Wat Khun Samut's compound have been abandoned, and new wooden floors have been built a little higher up. The old carved wooden shutters of the main temple lie in a useless pile on the new floor.

A few new buildings are under construction, resting on wooden and concrete pillars grouted into concrete slabs sunk into the mud beneath, which is under inches of water during a normal high tide.

Maintaining the stone embankment alone costs about 300,000 baht (S$14,000) a year, the abbot told The Straits Times.

But the effort seems to be paying off, at least for now, observes Dr Anond Snidvongs, a marine biologist and climate change expert with South-east Asia Start. Start, which stands for System for Analysis, Research and Training, is a network dedicated to researching and forecasting long- term environmental change.

South-east Asia Start's regional centre at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University has been studying climate change in the region since 1997.

At Wat Khun Samut, the abbot shows Dr Anond how the mud has stabilised behind the embankment, and is about a metre above the level of the mud outside, which is exposed at high tide. Mangrove vegetation is colonising it and will stabilise it further, buying time for the wat in the face of the triple forces of land subsidence, rising sea level and the battering waves of storm surges.

Global warming, part of which is caused by the melting northern polar ice cap, is inducing a rise in sea level worldwide. Temperature changes affect climate and often weather as well, producing more violent storms, for instance.

Land subsidence is a fairly common natural process in countries across the world prone to it for geological reasons. It is independent of global warming, but its effect is severely exacerbated in coastal areas by sea-level rise and storms.

'A lot of effort has been put into saving this place,' says Dr Anond, who is toying with the idea of promoting it for tourism, both local and foreign, to show people what global warming has in store for the world's low-lying region.

Upstream, at an old naval base and museum near the mouth of the Chao Phraya river, the roads in the area are flooded with sea water at high tide in November and December, when the moon is at its closest and the north-east monsoon winds swell and whip up the sea.

Bangkok already has many problems which are raising red flags - and an encroaching sea will only compound them.

In a few years, the Thai capital city of Bangkok may well be in the same situation as New Orleans, in the United States, which lives in the shadow of levees that keep out huge volumes of water higher than the level of the city's streets.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina unleashed so much rain that rising water in the Mississippi river, combined with a weakened levee and the earlier neutralising of important water-absorbing buffer wetlands outside the city, broke through and inundated New Orleans. More than 1,800 people were killed and tens of thousands forced to flee the stricken city.

In one of his filing cabinets, Thailand's disaster relief czar Smith Thammasaroj has a cross-sectional graphic of Bangkok drawn up by a Japanese consultant engineer.

It was Dr Smith who famously predicted that a tsunami triggered by an undersea earthquake could strike and wipe out beaches and people along the country's Andaman coast. His prediction was made 17 years before the December 2004 event

The map that he keeps at hand shows the water levels in the Chao Phraya - and those of some of Bangkok's bigger klongs or canals - are substantially higher than portions of the city.

Bangkok is subsiding partly because ground water is being drained from underground aquifers. And as the sea level rises, things can only become more perilous.

It is not only the land itself that is at stake; the volume of water in the Chao Phraya as it rolls down to the sea helps keep the salt water at bay during high tide. This is critical because the Thai capital as well as many of the fields around it depend solely on the Chao Phraya for drinking water.

Every year, the irrigation department releases water from upstream dams into the Chao Phraya to keep sea water out and maintain the integrity of Bangkok's water supply.

The level of the sea in the Gulf of Thailand is rising at a rate of 2.33mm a year.

'It works now, but whether it will in the future we do not know; we may have to think of alternative water sources,' says Dr Anond.

Including around 10 million people in Bangkok, some 20 million people live in close proximity to Thailand's coast.

A World Bank report released earlier this month paints a bleak picture of the ill health of Thailand's marine and coastal ecosystems and biodiversity. It adds: 'Climate change and an associated rise in sea level are expected to inundate coastal areas and negatively impact livelihoods and GDP (gross domestic product). In particular, impact in the flat and low-lying Gulf area, including Bangkok, is expected to be high.'

The process of inundation is already well under way.

At Bang Khun Tien, Mr Suchat Chantad, a local official accompanying Dr Anond on his rounds, points to where his house had been when he was forced to abandon it 20 years ago. Today, it is under two to three metres of sea water.

'It shows what other places are going to look like in the future,' Dr Anond remarks, as the longtail boat they are in zig-zags its way among the telephone and electricity poles.

The World Bank report notes: 'Erosion has become one of (Thailand's) primary environmental challenges. 'In many areas, the coastline is eroding at a rate of more than one to five metres a year, resulting in a loss each year of an area equivalent to two sq km, worth over six billion baht.'

In Bang Khun Tien, the current rate of erosion is as much as 10m per year, and is 'likely to increase to 25m a year', says Dr Anond.

And he has also confirmed reports of an ominous sign - an unusually high spring tide in May - although there is still debate in the scientific community over this occurrence.

Across Thailand, global warming is expected to affect weather patterns. 'It seems from our modelling that we will have a little bit more rain on average, but in a shorter rainy season,' says Dr Anond.

That means more floods and a longer period of drought - making water management and supply a major challenge.

The Mekong river, which runs through Thailand, China, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, is also vulnerable. Around 15 to 20 per cent of the river's water emanate from glaciers; the rest is from rainfall.

Accelerated glacial melt and erratic rain will definitely affect the destiny of the world's 10th-longest river. About 90 million people living along the river's course depend on it for water and means of livelihood.

Soil productivity could also decline if there are changes in the mix of plants and microbes in the soil, which are essential to nutrient recycling.

Alarm bells are also ringing over the fate of the marine ecosystem. Higher carbon dioxide levels in the water would lead to acidification and threaten some creatures of the sea, such as sea urchins, snails and clams.

Thailand has set up a national committee on climate change, and the relevant ministries have a much greater understanding of issues, says Dr Anond. Many agencies are seeing climate change as an opportunity.

The issue is a hot one, not just in the country, and has begun to attract funding.

But, says Dr Anond, 'We don't really need the committee.'

'We need climate as a component in our national development agenda, otherwise there will only be a lot of talk and no action.'
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