In our bid to aggressively expand our land mass, it seems that our voracious appetite for sand comes at the cost of an isolated Cambodian fishing village: Koh Sralav.
While the city-state continues to expand through land reclamation projects, Koh Sralav's coastal mangrove forests are getting decimated due to vigorous dredging, reports The Christian Science Monitor. As the largest sand importer in the world, we're buying up tens of millions of tons of sand — and Cambodian firms are more than happy to oblige.
The losers? Koh Sralav's fishermen, who rely on catching the crabs and fish that once lived among the roots in one of Southeast Asia's largest mangrove forests. Years of sand dredging have deepened the shallow estuaries around the village, causing strong currents to eat away at the riverbanks and destroy the mangrove.