Bangkok is one of 13 of the world’s largest 20 cities at risk of being swamped as sea levels rise in coming decades. The still expanding megapolis rests about 3 1/2 to 5 feet above the nearby gulf, although some areas already lie below sea level. The gulf’s waters have been rising by about a tenth of an inch a year, about the same as the world average. Experts say these waters, aided by sinking land, threaten to submerge Thailand’s sprawling capital of more than 10 million people within this century.
“You notice that every highway, road and building which has no foundation pilings is sinking,” says Smith. “We feel that with the ground sinking and the sea water rising, Bangkok will be under sea water in the next 15 to 20 years — permanently.”
Once known as the “Venice of the East,” Bangkok was founded 225 years ago on a swampy floodplain along the Chao Phraya River. But beginning in the 1950s, on the advice of international development agencies, most of the canals were filled in to make roads and combat malaria. This fractured the natural drainage system that had helped control Bangkok’s annual monsoon season flooding.
“It’s the only city in the world where a car has collided with a boat” says Smith, recalling a deluge where residents commuted by rickety boats down roads flanked by high-rises.
The loss of Bangkok would destroy the country’s economic engine and a major hub for regional tourism. “If the heart of Thailand is under water everything will stop” says Smith Dharmasaroja, chair of the government’s Committee of National Disaster Warning Administration. “We don’t have time to move our capital in the next 15-20 years. We have to protect our heart now, and it’s almost too late.
“This is what the future will look like in many places around the world,” says Lisa Schipper, an American researcher on global warming, while visiting the temple. “Here is a living study in environmental change.”
More than one-tenth of the world’s population, or 643 million people, live in low-lying coastal areas at risk from climate change, say U.S. and European experts. Most imperiled, in descending order, are China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, the U.S., Thailand and the Philippines.
In addition to Bangkok, they include Dhaka in Bangladesh; Buenos Aires in Argentina; Rio de Janeiro in Brazil; Shanghai and Tianjin in China; Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt; Mumbai and Kolkata in India; Jakarta in Indonesia; Tokyo and Osaka-Kobe in Japan; Lagos in Nigeria; Karachi in Pakistan; and New York and Los Angeles in the United States, according to studies by the United Nations and others.
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