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.