Our Link to The Sea
Every Christmas, my father takes our entire family — me, my brother Girik, my sister Mihika, and Mom — to Bandra in India to offer prayers at the illuminated churches sandwiched between decked-out, glowing apartment buildings.
To get there, we take the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, a breathtaking suspension bridge that cuts travel time in half for us. Dad reminds us that when he was a kid, the bridge wasn’t there, and the ocean was in charge of the area. He tells us how in between waves, he and his cousins plucked fruits from trees popping out between mangrove tangles while birds that have long since fled patrolled the untamed shoreline.
Bandra is an area that was quite recently so far from the north of the city known as Bombay that it really wasn’t even considered part of the city. As Bombay became Mumbai, the city grew, and grew, and grew, and then grew some more. Soon, Bandra went from being on the outskirts to what it is now, the geographical center of a megapolis expanding by the minute.
Within the sea of changes that have taken place over the last several decades here on the western Maharashtra coast, there has been one apt constant: the sea itself. This city’s natural border. But, as my dad reminds me, even that too is changing. And, in ways that foreshadow a devastating twenty-first century.
Earth is blanketed by 71% of water and the coastlines form the spine of the coexistence between land and water.
Our coastlines are under a constant threat of deformation due to climate change. Specifically, the risks posed by climate change to those who live close to the sea can no longer be ignored.
As the human population rises, concentration in cities skyrockets. And, of course, dozens of the world’s most populous and economically essential cities abut the oceans. Construction projects have pushed development in many of these cities to their limit. If development continues to rise, there won’t be any land left to build on. And thus, people have started to pounce upon oceans.
Destroying existing coastal barriers and filling the oceans up to reclaim land, according to planners, is the only way for development to exist. Therefore, new coastal barriers would have to be made regularly.
A multitude of natural coastal barriers (natural shore protective barriers) are the first line of defense for coastal communities. These often include naturally occurring seagrasses, salt marshes, biogenic reefs, and the master buffer of all: mangroves. They stabilize shorelines by slowing down erosion and offer coastal communities potent protection from storm surges, hurricanes, and more. At the same time, aquatic habitats are nurtured as an integral part of an ecosystem. These landforms are not made overnight but are formed as a part of evolution over hundreds and thousands of years to sustain marine life as well as adjoining human habitats in cohesion.
Even before climate change was a household term, coastal conditions could be perilous. Sometimes, the fury of natural calamities such as earthquakes and tsunamis trigger displacement and affect living conditions along the coastlines for human settlements. For people who have been already displaced, such occurrences hamper their return to normalcy. Crops and livestock struggle to survive in conditions that are either too hot and dry or too cold and wet.
Livelihoods are threatened and, in such situations, climate change multiples that naturally-occurring threat, turning a metaphorical brushfire into an inferno. Instead of talking about climate migrants, we now are talking about climate refugees forced to leave their homes to never return.
This is not a theoretical worst-case scenario prediction. It is already happening. According to the International Displacement Monitoring Centre, in just last year alone, 55 million people, including over 20 million children were displaced by climate crises. This number rises every year as storms and coastal volatility make it impossible to pick up the pieces of hope for a better “next year.” Flooding, fires, and storms are the new globalization — a seemingly inevitable trend that affects us all.
As a backdrop to these developments and what can be done about them, scientists are closely watching something happening at our southern pole. As reported widely last month, the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is showing unusual activity. Due to rising sea temperatures, the frontal section of the glacier has started to show signs of potential cracking, a development that even conservative climate researchers long suggested was centuries away.
Scientists from the UK and the US have started researching about this in detail, and many new investigations inside the glacier have been planned for 2022.
The Thwaites Glacier is the size of Great Britain. If it happens to break off and melt, it could cause global sea levels to rise by almost 65 centimeters. Such a rise in sea level would rewrite the emergency plans in place to deal with a rise a fraction of that size. It makes sense why this glacier has been rechristened as the “doomsday” glacier by many experts. Its dissolving would lead to the widespread destruction of coastal barriers and aquatic habitats while turning metropolises into lakes and coves.
Climate refugees could go from a seemingly alarmist term you read in newspapers to a reality for billions of people in a very short amount of time.
Two weeks ago, the family piled in our car for a ride down Marine Drive, near Nariman Point in South Mumbai. My Dad turned to me.
“This is all reclaimed land, son. It was once out there, but now it’s here for us to drive on. But it’s not what’s been added that’s important. It’s also important to remember that in order to add, they had to first take away.”
That was when I realized that here, like so many other coastal and near-coastal places where we walk, drive, shop, and play were once places we shared with plants and animals. The messy line between land and sea was busy but in a different way. It was busy with creatures big and small, crawling and swimming through the rooty tangles that keep that land protected from nature’s awesome power to alter and destroy. In the name of growth, we actually beheaded our future.
The price that we pay for real estate in these once-thriving sea areas cannot be measured in money. In fact, it cannot be measured at all. The price tag has more zeros than can fit. We just have to hope that through leadership, education, and actionable foresight, that check will never have to be written.
My Dad and I belong to different generations, but I see this world as a better place through his eyes.
I see a world where the only chance we have is one where we live as a part of a larger system and not as the supreme authority about where lines should be drawn, about what should be ours and what should be theirs, or about who must leave and who gets to stay home.
