They’ve sailed across Southeast Asia for centuries. Now, these sea nomads are being forced to live on land

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Bilkuin Jimi Salih doesn’t remember how old he was when he learned to dive, only, that all the men in his family can do it.

It might have been his grandfather who taught him, or his father, or even an uncle or cousin. He recalls swimming dozens of feet underwater among the reefs, collecting spider conches, abalone and sea cucumbers to sell at the local fish market.

“One of our specialties is that, because we live on the sea and we’re always in the sea, we can dive in the water for a long time,” says Salih, via a translator. “We learn by observing, and from there, we develop our own technique.”

To most people, Salih’s free diving skills are highly unusual; but not to his community. Salih is Bajau Laut, an indigenous seafaring group in Southeast Asia that has lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle on the ocean for centuries. Living on boats and fishing for income and sustenance, the Bajau Laut aren’t just reliant on the sea: they’re biologically adapted to it, with larger spleens that give them the ability to hold their breath for far longer than the average person.

“We’re very comfortable in the water,” says Salih. The 20-year-old was born on board a lepa, a type of houseboat, on the shore of Omadal Island, off the coast of Semporna in Malaysian Borneo.

But things are changing.

For generations, his family has depended on the sea, keeping time by the rhythm of the tides and asking water deities for safe passage to travel, fish and dive. Their traditional lifestyle has always been low impact: they take only what they need to survive, moving from reef to reef as fish shoals migrate and allowing the ecosystem time to regenerate.

“We could easily get a bucket of abalone and sea cucumbers before, but now there’s hardly any,” Salih explains. “Other high-value fish are also available less. So for us to rely on the sea as a source of living is now very difficult, very challenging.”

Like many other Bajau Laut in the region, Salih and his family gave up their houseboat and now live in a stilt house over shallow water. Lepas are costly and difficult to build, he says, and with the little income from fishing, families often can’t afford to maintain them.

More and more Bajau Laut are abandoning their traditional way of life, making them increasingly vulnerable to environmental changes. In decades gone by, when fish were lacking, families would simply move on. But adopting sedentary lives makes them less adaptable, and more reliant on a specific island or reef.

As climate change threatens the marine environment more than ever, the traditions of the Bajau Laut are quickly disappearing.

An underwater paradise

Semporna should be an aquatic paradise. The coastal town is located near the top of the Coral Triangle, a 5.7 million square kilometer (2.2 million square mile) area of extraordinary marine biodiversity that encompasses the waters of six nations. In the 1980s, filmmaker and oceanographer Jacque Cousteau visited Sipadan Island off the coast of Semporna, and described its reefs as “an untouched piece of art,” turning the area into one of the world’s most coveted dive spots.

But the reality is a little different.

The over-exploitation of fish stocks in Southeast Asia is being exacerbated by rising sea surface temperatures and ocean acidity, leading to a loss of fish habitats. In Malaysia, stocks of bottom-dwelling demersal fish are down by up to 90% in some regions.

Coastal communities living by the sea are “highly vulnerable” to other climate change phenomena, including coral bleaching, rising sea levels, beach erosion, and extreme weather events, says Adzmin Fatta, program manager at Reef Check Malaysia and co-founder of Green Semporna, both environmental non-profits.

The worsening marine environment and scarcity of fish has made many low-income fishers desperate. In a bid to compete with a growing number of commercial fisheries, many have turned to illegal, and often harmful, methods to increase their catch, like blast or cyanide fishing.

“Fish bombing is cheap and easy,” says Fatta. A fish bomb costs around 15 Malaysian ringgit ($3.60) he says — but could provide 2,000-to-3,000-ringgit worth of fish ($478 to $717).

Fish bombing has been used in the region for decades. By 2010, an estimated 68% of the coral reefs in Sabah — the state which occupies the east side of Malaysian Borneo — had been damaged by cyanide fishing, and between 2010 and 2018, around 25% of Sabah’s monitored reefs were disturbed by blast fishing.

Plastic pollution is also a growing problem, adding more pressure to an already fragile marine ecosystem, says Robin Philippo, director of the Tropical Research and Conservation Centre (TRACC), a marine conservation organization working on reef rehabilitation near Semporna.

Water bottles, crisp packets, and errant flip-flops are a common sight on the waves, and while many in the local community blame the Bajau Laut, Philippo believes tourism is responsible for the majority of this waste. “The carrying capacity of Semporna compared to the waste that is being produced, I think that’s the unsustainable factor,” he says.

Tourism is one of the country’s biggest economic sectors, and in Sabah, it’s growing rapidly, increasing 120% between 2004 and 2018.

Pom Pom Island, where TRACC is based, used to be a major nesting site for the region’s endangered green turtles. But now, the island is caught between many of these environmental pressure points. Its reefs have been largely destroyed by blast fishing, and new resorts are damaging the island’s remaining beaches, says Philippo.

“With the amount of construction that’s going on right now, the nesting turtles might completely disappear,” he adds.

A ‘stateless’ community

Despite living in the region for decades, even centuries, many of the Bajau Laut in Semporna are “stateless” and not considered Malaysian citizens. This leaves them in legal limbo, with no access to state education, healthcare, or utilities like electricity, water, and waste management.

There is limited data on how many stateless people are living in East Malaysia, or their demographics, but a recent population census estimated that 28,000 Bajau Laut are living in Sabah, around 78% of whom are undocumented.

The social stigma of statelessness means that, often, they’re excluded from efforts to protect the ocean and their traditional knowledge isn’t valued.

Adzmin Fatta, who works with many stateless people in Semporna through Reef Check Malaysia, says one of the major challenges to conservation in the area is the “unequal opportunities” for the coastal communities. Struggling with basic needs like housing, income, and sustenance — and without formal citizenship — they often don’t see themselves as having a role in conservation efforts and are not empowered to tackle environmental issues.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though.

In Indonesia’s Wakatobi regency, another area where the Bajau, sometimes called Bajo, lives, the group’s specialist knowledge was utilized in the creation of a national marine park.

“They’re very well immersed in fishing grounds and seasonality, the migration of fish, but they’re also very well aware of areas that are damaged or depleted. They know very much about navigation, currents, and upwelling areas,” says Rili Djohani, one of the leaders of this project in the 1990s and early 2000s and now executive director and co-founder of Coral Triangle Center, an NGO. “It’s maritime wisdom that you can actually build upon in terms of designing, for example, marine protected areas around critical habitats, like fish aggregation areas or coral reefs.”

However, across the region, Djohani hasn’t seen many efforts to support the preservation of the Bajau Laut culture and traditional lifestyle. The lack of economic opportunity in fishing and seafaring occupations is pushing more young people on land to look for work in tourism, she says.

“There are many ways to meaningfully engage people in conservation activities. But we should not lose sight of how they can earn an income in a sustainable, long-term way for their own families,” says Djohani.

Drowning in plastic

While poverty, statelessness and climate change are threatening the Bajau Laut’s cultural relationship with the ocean, some young people in the community are finding new ways to reconnect with the marine environment.

Imran Abbisi and Haikal Nukiman are both stateless and live in stilt houses in Kampung Bangau Bangau, a water village near Semporna that’s largely made up of stateless people. Like many living in the community, Abbisi and Nukiman have Bajau Laut ancestry but don’t want to follow in their parents’ and grandparents’ footsteps to spend their lives fishing.

“It used to be much nicer to spend the time in the ocean, but now there’s more trash in the water so it’s not fun anymore,” says Nukiman. Plastic pollution is particularly bad in their village, “because there’s no proper waste management system,” he says, which means it’s harder to look for shellfish in the shallows.

Unable to attend state school, Abbisi and Nukiman attend an alternative school run by education NGO Borneo Komrad, through which they got a four-month internship at marine conservation group TRACC.

Abbisi and Nukiman have been heavily involved with the center’s turtle hatchery, which monitors the island’s beaches for nests, and releases baby turtles back to the ocean.

Neither Abbisi nor Nukiman learned to free dive when they were growing up. But through TRACC, they’re trying it in a different way: with a PADI open-water scuba dive certificate, which will allow them to monitor the reef, collect data, and install artificial reefs.

Abbisi describes his first diving experience as “dreamlike,” and says that he wants to protect the ocean “for a much better world, for a greener world.”

While both students are enthusiastic about their work with TRACC, they don’t know if they’ll be able to continue to work in conservation. As stateless people, they will be unlikely to have the luxury of choice — and their families rely on them to provide income.

Robin Philippo, director of TRACC, hopes that the internship will give them more opportunities in the future, particularly in the eco-tourism and environmental sectors.

While TRACC employs a lot of people from the Bajau community in its back-of-house operations, Philippo admits they haven’t tapped into the community’s knowledge about the ocean as much as they could have, largely because of the language barrier. But he hopes that will change, as young people like Abbisi and Nukiman, who speak Bajau as well as Malay, get more involved.

Maintaining traditions

Back on Omadal, Salih is also trying to teach the next generation about the environment.

In addition to his part-time studies at Borneo Komrad’s alternative university, Salih is a teacher at Iskul, a school on Omadal for stateless Bajau Laut, where he teaches lessons on marine conservation, pollution and coral restoration, in addition to core subjects like Malay and mathematics. The school has also set up a waste management system, to give the community alternatives to throwing trash in the sea.

Salih thinks there are opportunities for the community to modernize and grow, while preserving traditions. Many students attend only a morning or afternoon session at Iskul, and spend the rest of their time helping their family to fish or learning how to harvest from the sea.

“We need to learn that skill so that we can continue catching fish for our livelihood,” says Salih.

And while stilt houses are cheaper to build and easier to repair, at some point, he wants to return to living on a lepa, a houseboat, like the one he was born on.

“I would like to maintain the traditions,” says Salih. “I will encourage my children to look and learn from me how to build a boat, and ensure that they also continue teaching it to their children, so that the tradition does not end.”

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