Climate change tourism: Indonesian village that sank offers grim lesson in the dangers of coastal erosion
- On the northern coast of Java island, large parts of a village have sunk since the 1990s and more than 500 families have been forced to evacuate
- As villagers plant mangroves and build sea defences, the drowned homes have become an eco-tourism destination, offering visitors a grim learning experience
Motorboats chug slowly down a canal running between mangrove forests in the village of Bedono, an eco-tourism area on the north coast of the island of Java, Indonesia. From a grove of mangrove trees, ruins of abandoned and partially submerged houses can be seen.
“The area that has now been overgrown with mangroves was once a residential area,” says tour guide Aryo Rifai.
As he drives our boat through the eerie scene, Rifai explains that erosion by waves began to undermine Bedono in the 1990s, sinking three hamlets: Senik, Tambaksari and Mondoliko.
The erosion in Bedono is estimated by the country’s Maritime Coordinating Ministry to be the most severe on the northern coast of Java. The area affected spans more than 2,000 hectares (eight square miles), and has shifted the coastline 5km (3 miles) inland.
More than 500 families have been forced to evacuate to safer areas. Around 300 hectares of ponds, hundreds of houses, and public facilities such as tombs, roads, bridges and mosques, have all sunk. Once fertile agricultural land was left to be swallowed by mangrove forest.
“People did not think that their prosperity would disappear because of erosion,” says Rifai, 51, pointing out a mosque whose bottom is submerged in water, its walls blackened and dull. Storks, endemic to this forest and protected here, observe us, perched on mangrove branches.
