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View all search resultsLand erosion worsens on Riau’s Bengkalis Island, may alter maritime border
Changes in an island's shoreline can lead to the changes in basepoints for maritime border with neighboring countries.
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Green patrol: Mangrove conservationists conduct a riverine patrol on April 12, 2025 at the Teluk Pambang mangrove forest in Bengkalis regency, Riau. (Antara/Aswaddy Hamid)
T
he coastline of Bengkalis Island in Riau is one of Indonesia’s outermost islands, but the island's coast has continued to lose significant land from sea abrasion, which may lead to changes in the maritime border with peninsular Malaysia.
Ongoing erosion may shrink the island and reduce Indonesia’s territory because Bengkalis Island is one of the baselines for Indonesia’s maritime boundary with Malaysia.
Its location on the edge of the Malacca Strait has made the island vulnerable to weather changes and tidal dynamics that generate large waves. Composed largely of peatlands, the island’s coastline has become easily eroded by waves.
One location severely affected by the erosion is Mekar Indah Parit Tiung hamlet in Jangkang village, Bengkalis district, which directly faces the Malacca Strait. Confronting significant waves year after year, land erosion has reached plantation and residential homes.
“The villagers already requested immediate construction of concrete sea wall and planting [of] more mangrove trees to prevent even worse erosion,” a neighborhood unit (RT) chief in Jangkang, Suharno said on Jan. 21.
The government installed stone gabion wave breakers in 2018, but he said they were ineffective because they were positioned too far from the shoreline.
“The gabion had been placed some 1 kilometer from shoreline, therefore many plots of land owned by villagers [continued] to suffer from abrasion,” he said.
