Czy opaski brzegowe uratują tajlandzkie plaże?

August 12, 2023 - Samrej Beach, Surat Thani province. A local man searches for sea snails during low tide on Samrej Beach in Surat Thani province. Here, low tide reveals kilometres of mud flats which happen to have a vast abundance of marine life, something which the local people capitalise on to collect shellfish. According to Sompratana Ritphring, a lecturer in water resources engineering at a university in Bangkok who has spent the past decade studying the seawalls and their impacts “The beach is the most dynamic natural phenomenon out there. Even in one day, it doesn’t stay the same. It’s charming, but also difficult to deal with at the same time. That’s why each beach cannot have the same solution. It has to be studied first, on a case-by-case basis.” 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.