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The Java Sea has pursued Sunarti for years, first submerging her birthplace in Timbulsloko village, before forcing the mother of two to flee inland on the northern coast of Demak district in Indonesia’s Central Java province.
“I became unemployed,” the 53-year-old told Mongabay Indonesia. “The crops we planted wouldn’t grow. I asked God, ‘Why is my life like this?’”
As each year passed, brackish water claimed more of the Demak coast, flooding the fields and fishponds in this farming district of 1.2 million people.
The water invaded homes and places of business after breaching flood defences built by communities to hold back the tide. When floodwater intruded into cemeteries, families confronted grief for their loved ones once again.
“The water gradually rose up and the roads were submerged,” Sunarti said. “In the end, my father and I went to Semarang on a bicycle.”
Sunarti’s new start in Indonesia’s sixth-largest city, a busy port of almost 2 million people, at first involved casual work peeling onions and labouring on construction sites. Later, the mother of twowas trained to work in the fisheries sector.
However, most fishers on Java’s north coast, a region known as Pantura, are themselves struggling to adapt to changes at sea off the world’s most populous island. Mongabay reporting has documented Pantura’s fishers sailing ever farther from home just to sustain a living, as the costs of doing business mount.
Overfishing has pushed many fisheries to the brink of collapse or beyond, but research shows climate change will worsen this crisis by disrupting fish reproduction as oceans warm and acidify.
Sunarti decided to adapt to the loss of farmland by investing her earnings in Semarang in fishing gear. She learned how to fish from her brother and soon began earning a living on a small boat in the Java Sea.
“We have to put up a fight against what we’re facing,” she told Mongabay.
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Women and children, as well as poor families, including the elderly and disabled, are the most [climate] vulnerable. They have debts for daily needs. Those debts eventually pile up, and the woman is the backbone of the family.
Hermawati Sasongko, coordinator, LBH Apik Semarang
Fen for oneself
In the late 15th century, Demak emerged as Indonesia’s first Muslim sultanate, a dominant Javanese maritime regime in which women like Sunarti, at times, held significant power.
Queen Kalinyamat survived bloody power struggles as ruler of neighbouring Jepara, a Demak vassal, and built a formidable navy, which she twice dispatched to support the Johor Sultanate against Portuguese colonial forces in what is today Malaysia.
Decades ago, historians recorded that the area around Demak in the time of the sultanate was seen as “swampy, and often flooded.”
In recent years, that sinking feeling around Demak has worsened. Contemporary research finds the modern population centres across Java’s northern coast are fast subsiding.
“Jakarta, Pekalongan, Semarang, and Demak subside at least 9x faster than the present-day rate of global sea level rise,” according to research published in 2023 in the Nature Research journal Scientific Data.
Civil society researchers say the women of Demak and countless other coastal communities on climate change frontlines face worsening risks as the ground sinks beneath their feet.
Globally, fieldworkers and researchers have found an association between environmental stress and domestic violence, citing extensive anecdotal testimony following disasters, as well as peer-reviewed studies.
In 2023, Mongabay Indonesia reported from a fishing community in Jakarta where many girls face child marriage, a form of gender-based violence, owing to economic decline linked to overfishing and the rising cost of living.
“As climate change impacts access to resources and livelihoods, women and girls, especially those experiencing multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, face heightened risks of gender-based violence,” the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) noted in a 2023 report on gender-based violence and climate change in the Arab region.
“There are hardly any other jobs or activities, so men sit idle all day,” a resident of Pakistan’s Sindh province told UK-based charity Oxfam following catastrophic floods there in 2022. “The frustration of poverty results in acts of violence, and women bear the brunt.”
A review of public health surveys and rainfall data in 19 sub-Saharan African countries found an association between drought and violence against women and girls, with the link stronger among unemployed women.
Similarly, research has found that water stress in refugee camps in Jordan, home to more than 1 million refugees from Syria and elsewhere, may be linked to increases in reported cases of gender-based violence.
Civil society groups working on coastlines in Indonesia say that land subsidence, coastal abrasion and the longer-term effects of rising seas, combined with a shortfall of adaptation funds, put women and girls here at increased risk.
“Our conclusion is that women and children, as well as poor families, including the elderly and disabled, are the most vulnerable,” Hermawati Sasongko, who leads the Semarang office of LBH Apik, a women-centred legal aid nonprofit, told Mongabay Indonesia.
Her office has recorded 95 cases of gender-based violence in more than six years to the first quarter of 2025 in Demak, suggesting violence against women and girls is going unreported to authorities.
“They have debts for daily needs. Those debts eventually pile up, and the woman is the backbone of the family,” Hermawati said. “When the wife asks her husband [for money], the husband hits the wife, and that’s when you get violence.”
“The impact of climate change is not felt the same by everyone,” the UNFPA concluded in its 2023 report.
Swamp thing
About 45 kilometers (28 miles) north of Demak in Jepara, the maritime fiefdom once ruled by Queen Kalinyamat, Sri Wahyuni says she feels the land and sea by her home in Bandungharjo village have become increasingly barren.
“When I was a child, I felt gemah ripah loh jinawi,” Sri told Mongabay Indonesia, using a Javanese language expression celebrating the fertility of the local environment.
“During the shrimp season, we’d catch a lot, and fish as well,” she said. “We’re a long way from that now.”
For at least a decade, sand-mining concessions to supply construction and microchip industries have defaced many of the area’s beaches.
Last year, then-president Joko Widodo repealed a 20-year ban on the export of Indonesian coastal sand, which is now spurring further land-use change in the world’s largest archipelagic country.
Advocating against development on this coastline in Central Java province can be dangerous. Last year, a court in Jepara sentenced Daniel Frits Maurits Tangkilisan to seven months in prison for Facebook posts in which he highlighted illegal shrimp farms operating in Karimunjawa National Park. He was later exonerated on appeal.
Susan Herawati, who runs the People’s Coalition for Fisheries Justice, known as Kiara, a civil society organisation that has supported women’s groups in Demak, says development projects on Java’s coastline have uprooted communities and worsened environmental damage.
Some 46 of these construction sites have been classified as “national priority projects,” she said, enabling developers to cut through community objections.
“It is the biggest contributor on top of the impact of the climate crisis,” Susan said.
Sri Wahyuni wanted to confront these challenges on the Java coast, and received training from Kiara fieldworkers to participate in the local fisheries economy.
“We were motivated that women can do it well and support the family economy,” Sri said.
Ten years ago, they built a small production site on the water in which women learned to prepare shrimp paste and preserve fish using salt. The income from the small business went straight to families like Sri’s.
When a storm surge destroyed the workplace they’d built, Sri and colleagues rebuilt it, then went back to work.
“Little by little we made more and more, and now this Ramadan we’re overwhelmed meeting demand for takjil for breaking the fast,” Sri said, referring to the evening meal after the day’s fast.
Subsidence on the coastline here has to date raised the water level by up to 2 meters (6 feet).
Pushing tide
Sunarti and Sri are among millions of women facing environmental change on Indonesia’s coastlines.
Globally, the coastal population has surged from 1.6 billion to 2.5 billion people in just three decades, according to the UN More than three-quarters of that number live in low- and middle-income countries, many in vulnerable positions like Sunarti and Sri.
Data published in 2021 showed around 8,000 hectares (almost 20,000 acres) of Central Java coastline have been lost to flooding. Demak district accounts for more than a quarter of this total.
As the coastal environment deteriorates, risks of ill health accumulate. Floating garbage, poorer housing conditions, less resilience to extreme weather events, and higher costs all risk worsening or entrenching poverty.
Timbulsloko, Sunarti’s home village, was flooded more than a decade ago, and today only a quarter of 400 families who used to live there remain, with each spending large sums to adapt their homes to the water. Reported cases of ill health have increased as the community resorts to open defecation.
In 2022, wealthy countries transferred US$28 billion to enable low- and middle-income countries to better adapt to climate change. That amount was up by a third from the previous year, but far short of the $38 billion target agreed under the Glasgow Climate Pact, which was signed by almost 200 countries in 2021.
The origin of the name of the sultanate is disputed: Some historians link Demak to the Javanese word delemak, a swamp.
Local people said the water used to recede in the end, but that Timbulsloko village became a permanent flood around 2015.
Sunarti adapted to the change by saving and joining the Indonesian Fisherwomen’s Union (PPNI), which has helped local women obtain accreditation and training to work in the trade.
“When the soil was good I used to be happy planting,” Sunarti said. “That was before the flood.”
This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.
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