Pantai Bahagia and Kampung Beting in Bekasi West Java,Indonesia has been slowly disappearing under the sea as the climate crisis looms.Crumbling walls, permanently flooded front yards and houses raised on bamboo poles to prevent water damage are tell-tale signs of the problem the community faces.Arphiah (50),She was born in the region when the rising tides had not begun to threaten the community’s existence.”When I was young there were no floods, but now they take place twice a month,”she said.Estimated more than 1,000 families in five villages have been affected by coastal erosion and close to 100 have had to emigrate.

Since the 1980s, the community has lost 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) of its coast and 3 km of residential areas due to flooding during high tide, which began to get worse in the last decade.The community is the worst-affected among five settlements in the estuary of the Citarum River in northern Java, an area where the government replaced mangroves with fish farms in the 1970s to boost the local economy.Ridwan,a fisherman who lives in a house on the edge of the sea in Pantai Bahagia, said the houses are situated in an area where the invading sea has severely affected some of the fish farms.

He said the fish catch had reduced from 20 or 30 kilograms (44-66 pounds) a day to around 5 kg, adding that if the advancing sea was not checked, they might be forced to move.”