Temple in the Sea

A Buddhist community fights the pushing tide.

- Brent Lewin

As the Paris Agreement on climate change comes into effect, many people are left wondering if it’s already too late to save many of the world’s vulnerable low-lying coastal communities. The science shows that sea levels worldwide have been rising at a rate of 3.5 millimetres per year since the early 1990s. This rising sea level is directly linked to global climate change due to three important factors: the warming of the oceans, or thermal expansion; the melting of glaciers; and ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica.

A recent study from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the oceans will have risen between 0.8 and two metres by the year 2100. More dire estimates, including a complete meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, push sea level rise to seven metres. This becomes particularly frightening for the approximately 150 million people living in low-lying coastal areas that will either be submerged, or exposed to chronic flooding, owing to even a small increase in sea levels.

According to Climate Central, a nonprofit news organisation that analyses and reports on climate science, around nine million people in Thailand alone – approximately 13 percent of the population – will be affected by sea level rise in the coming years. Bangkok, a city sometimes called “the Venice of the East”, faces the threat of chronic flooding as rising sea levels and sinking land threaten to submerge the capital in the coming decades.

While many experts can agree that Bangkok is heading for trouble, there is much debate about when. The looming chaos may seem far off to some, but for the residents of Khun Samut Chin, a small fishing community 38 kilometres south of Bangkok, sea level rise and the realities of climate change have already shaken the community to its core.