The vengeful sea devouring Albania’s coast

QERRET, Albanie: Asim Krasniqi watches anxiously as the Adriatic Sea creeps ever closer to his beach bar in Albania, a country faced with an alarming pace of coastal erosion. “I’m nostalgic for how this place used to be,” the septuagenarian told AFP wistfully, remembering when this beach in Qerret, to the west of the capital Tirana, was bigger and “many more” foreign tourists came. “Today everything is degraded,” he said. Environmentalists say a dangerous mix of climate change and rampant, unregulated urban development are behind the rapid disappearance of the shoreline in the impoverished Balkan country. “The sea has swallowed the coast. She is taking revenge on man, who has destroyed nature,” said Sherif Lushaj, an environmental specialist at Polis University in Tirana. The initially “inconspicuous” phenomenon has become far more serious in recent years, Lushaj told AFP. Further north along the coast, near the concrete constructions in the beach resort town of Shengjin, dozens of tree trunks are decaying in water, a reminder that there used to be a forest between the sea and Kune lagoon. The lagoon is now threatened, less and less protected by a thin strip of land that is fast disappearing.

Once perched on sand dunes, nuclear bunkers built during the communist era of dictator Enver Hoxha also now barely emerge above the water. Others have been engulfed by the sea. Of the 427 kilometers (265 miles) of Albania’s coast, “154 are affected by erosion”, Environment Minister Blendi Klosi told AFP.