Czy opaski brzegowe uratują tajlandzkie plaże?

August 10, 2023 - Don Thale beach, Surat Thani province. Sutthirak Songsiang, a community leader from Don Thale Beach, leads a local community savings program for local women. She became one of the main opponents of a sea wall development project at her beach, a fight which the locals won and no sea wall was built. She recalled that the “public hearing” only consisted of the officials explaining the benefits of a seawall, and letting the residents choose one from different types available; they were not told at any point they could have said no. “They said they’ve been building it in many places, and if they don’t build one at our beach, the beach will disappear,” Sutthirak said. The beach remains to this day. Thailand is renowned for its iconic and idyllic beaches which draw millions of tourists every year. But concrete seawalls are becoming an increasingly common sight along Thailand’s eastern and southern coastlines in recent years, slowly replacing the geographical features that have made Thailand famous. According to Beach for Life, a group that monitors the construction of these structures and the environmental impact they have, at least 125 of them have been built since 2015, the year the group began its tracking. Seawalls have been making an appearance along Thailand’s shorelines since the late 1980s, introduced by officials as a measure to protect towns and beaches from coastal erosion, though they were strictly regulated due to environmental concerns. But a surge on construction began in 2015 shortly after the government at the time exempted the seawalls from the mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment, or EIA, paving the way for officials to approve the seawall projects all over Thailand – each of them costing in the millions – without the usual stringent scrutiny mandated by the EIA. The authority responsible for the seawalls argues that such structures are needed to protect stretches of beaches from erosion or being wiped away by the increasingly potent storms. But environmentalists and conservation advocates say that relying on the seawalls as a one-size-fits-all solution can cause irreparable damage to the local ecology.