Indonesian teacher Sulkan goes through pictures at his small sea-surrounded mosque, pondering nostalgically about a marching band and children with huge smiles who graduated from his kindergarten, who used to stand on a road now submerged by dirty, green water. That is just one of many landmarks in the Javan coastal village of Timbulsloko submerged by rising tides, which has not left any option for residents but they have to adapt to a new life on the water.
More than 200 people have stayed on in one of Indonesia’s fastest sinking areas, which has switched from a landscape of lush rice paddies into a maze of boardwalks and canoes, in a threatening sign of how climate change could defeat coastal communities everywhere. “It’s only memories now… there are no such activities anymore,” said 49-year-old Sulkan, who like many Indonesians goes by one name. “Why? Because the place is already flooded by the tide.”
Timbulsloko residents’ lives have been majorly changed by rising sea levels, coastal erosion and immoderate groundwater extraction leading to the land to sink. The coastline has also been left at risk to floods after locals have chopped off mangroves because of their activity of fishing ponds in the 1990s. Large areas of megalopolis capital Jakarta are expected to be flooded by the year 2050.