BAN KHUN SAMUT CHIN, Thailand - Each morning, four children stand barefoot in a line and proudly sing the national anthem as the Thai flag is raised outside their school, perched on a finger of land surrounded by the sea.
“I used to have many friends, around 20 or 21 classmates when I started kindergarten,” says 11-year-old Jiranan Chorsakul.At a Buddhist temple, supported on posts as it juts far out into the turbid brown-green waters of the Bay of Bangkok, village head Wisanu Kengsamut told AFP that two kilometres of land have been lost to the sea in the past 60 years.
If warming trends continue, the oceans could rise by nearly one additional metre around the Pacific and Indian Ocean islands by the end of the century. “We can see this as a stark microcosm of the risk that sea-level rise poses to us, particularly in the developing world,” he told AFP. And dams upstream on the Chao Phraya – the river that flows through Bangkok and discharges near the village – have slowed the deposition of sediment in the bay.
“We have no plans to move the village further inland because there is no more land for us to move to, so we must try to preserve what we have somehow,” he says.“I’ve given up hope that the government will step in. We have to save ourselves.”The village has a homestay programme and hopes to use eco-tourism tours to raise money and educate the public about their fight for survival.
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