With a watchful eye, Sanusi scanned the water in front of him as he drove his wooden boat along an unnamed narrow offshoot of West Java’s Citarum River.
The tide is low, revealing mangrove tree roots jutting out of the water, binding themselves to the loose and slowly eroding mud along the riverbank.
Sanusi slowed his boat as he neared his village Beting, not wanting the propellers attached to his boat to catch the many tree trunks and garbage in the water.
As the boat crawled further downstream, houses in various stages of decay started to reveal themselves.
Although some remained occupied, the majority of the houses were abandoned, with their walls infested by mould and fungi while their wooden doors rotted away. Some stood lopsided while others were reduced to rubble.
The houses were surrounded by pools of mud and water left behind by a recent tidal flood which completely inundated Sanusi’s Beting village in the northern coast of Java, some 40km northeast of Jakarta.
The tidal flood hits Beting twice a month, at full and new moons. During those periods, the sea swells because of the gravitational force of the moon and drowns the entire village in water up to 1m deep.
The water, Sanusi said, sometimes linger for seven days.
I fear that one day this village will become one with the sea, the 50-year-old fisherman told CNA.
It has not always been like this, Sanusi said. The village was once a productive fish farming area and home to 600 families.
But for the past 11 years, the sea encroached more than 6,000ha of fish ponds and residential areas in Beting and climate change, which resulted in rising sea level, stronger winds and bigger waves, has exacerbated the problem. Waves lapping on the shores carry away with them soils along the coast.
Today, only 100 families remain in Beting village, battling the fortnightly tidal floods which also inundate schools, mosques and the potholed road which serves as the village’s only land access to the outside world.
The erosion has become so severe that tidal floods have reached houses which sit as far away as 4km from where the coastline used to be.
And the habitable area is confined to a strip of land along a small river, sandwiched by eroding fish ponds on either sides.
In Central Java’s Demak regency, coastal abrasion has turned 3,200ha of residential and farming areas into a wasteland for the last 20 years, displacing thousands of people and leaving at least three villages under water.
In fact, throughout the northern coast of Java, there are numerous areas with alarming coastal abrasion rates dotting the 1,100km coastline, although none are as bad as Demak and Beting.
Scientists said the northern coast of Java is more prone to erosion than other areas in Indonesia.
The land there is low lying and made up of mostly compacted mud formed through millenniums of sediment pile up, scientists told CNA, making it more susceptible to erosion.
The coastline also sits directly in the path of the west monsoon winds, which travels from mainland Asia to Australia between November and March, bringing with it big and strong waves as it enters the shallow Java Sea.
While coastal abrasion is a natural phenomenon which has been going on for millions of years in Java, today the process is aggravated because of climate change.
2013 Borneo Bulletin Online – The Independent Newspaper in Brunei Darussalam, Sabah and Sarawak