via UNESCO, 24 January 2924: The UNESCO Jakarta office convened a regional meeting to address environmental hazards and looting threats posed by World War II shipwrecks in Southeast Asia. With over 500 sunken warships, including 100 oil tankers, the imminent risk of fuel leaks and structural collapses calls for urgent action. I attended this workshop last year, and it was indeed alarming to learn about how these shipwrecks are each environmental time bombs that are waiting to go off, some as soon as the next five years, and how nobody has a plan to deal with them.
The event brought together policy makers, international and national experts associated with maritime and Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH), and representatives of Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Timor-Leste and Viet-Nam in Jakarta, Indonesia.
The seas of Southeast Asia contain over 2 million tons of sunken vessels, including 500 World War II shipwrecks, 100 of which are oil tankers. After more than 75 years of corrosion, fuel leaks from the warships are expected to reach their highest levels within next decades but scientists do not yet have enough data to forecast when exactly or where individual leaks will occur. Besides, many of the vessels have also been the target of looting and commercial exploitation.
Source: World War Shipwrecks in Southeast Asia – threats of marine pollution and looting
