-By LeN Envionmental Correspondent
(Lanka-e-News -30.Nov.2025, 11.00 PM) As Sri Lanka reels from yet another cycle of catastrophic flooding, with swollen rivers swallowing entire neighbourhoods and families climbing onto rooftops awaiting rescue, there is a question that hangs heavily in the air — one that many politicians avoid, but the public can no longer ignore: How many of these disasters are actually natural? And how many have we built with our own hands?
For decades, Sri Lankans have been warned not to build on wetlands, not to tamper with old paddy fields, not to fill marshes for quick profit, not to dump waste into canals, and not to carve hotels out of mountain tops. But as the country wakes up once again to submerged towns and evacuated villages, it becomes painfully clear that those warnings were never taken seriously.
This week’s devastation is not an isolated tragedy brought by Cyclone Ditwah alone. It is the predictable culmination of 70 years of land mismanagement, weak local governance, and the relentless private greed of a small but powerful group of people — aided by public apathy, political protection, and a broken regulatory system.
Sri Lanka’s floods, experts now argue, are man-made disasters that nature merely triggers.
Across rural Sri Lanka, small villages that once sat peacefully beside waterways are today dealing with rising floodwaters they never experienced in centuries past. Much of this is tied to a simple, dangerous practice:
Filling up paddy fields and marshlands to build hotels, houses or commercial structures.
As one villager from Kurunegala remarked bitterly this week:
“One greedy man fills a paddy field against every rule in the book, and the entire village pays with floodwater inside their living rooms.”
This is not exaggeration. Paddy fields and wetlands are natural water buffers — they store excess rainwater and release it slowly. When a single landowner illegally fills one acre of marshland, the water that used to spread harmlessly over that field is forced elsewhere — usually straight into the neighbours’ homes.
Environmental planners estimate that more than 40% of Colombo District’s wetlands have been lost since the 1950s, replaced by housing schemes, warehouses, unauthorised hotels, container yards and private real-estate projects. The same is true in Gampaha, Kalutara, Kandy and parts of the Southern Province.
And yet, these illegal constructions continue with astonishing ease.
Officials often say, almost helplessly, that the offenders have “political backing,” “money to silence complaints,” or “connections that stop enforcement.” But villagers bear the consequences — year after year.
The next man-made enemy appears in the cities.
Every monsoon, rains pour down Colombo’s major roads with nowhere to go. The canals — once crystal clear waterways where, as elders remember, “children caught colourful fish 70 years ago” — have turned into black, stagnant garbage trenches.
Plastic bags, household waste, old furniture, commercial debris, construction rubble — all dumped casually into the drainage channels that protect the capital from floods.
The result is predictable:
Drains clog
Water backs up
Entire neighbourhoods submerge in minutes
City dwellers complain, but the problem is not an accident; it is learned behaviour. Vehicles stopping by canal banks to throw bags of trash are a common sight. Municipal waste systems remain underfunded. Enforcement is nonexistent.
The cost today is hundreds of thousands of families watching floodwater push into their homes, again.
As one resident of Wellampitiya put it:
“People throw garbage into the canal one day — the canal throws it back into their house the next.”
While coastal and low-lying areas drown, the hill country faces a different, deadlier threat: landslides.
For centuries, Sri Lanka’s mountain villages stood undisturbed — green slopes held in place by dense forests, natural vegetation and careful human settlement patterns. But in the last twenty years, wealthy developers have carved entire hotels, guesthouses and luxury holiday properties into mountain ridges.
Trees are cut. Soil is destabilised. Natural drainage patterns are disrupted.
When torrential rains follow, entire hillsides collapse.
This is not a theoretical risk. It is a statistical certainty.
Every year, communities in Nuwara Eliya, Badulla, Ratnapura and Matale watch in fear as both legal and illegal construction continues on slopes that geologists warn should never be touched.
Environmental activists have repeatedly begged government agencies to intervene — and on paper, dozens of laws exist:
Coast Conservation Act, Urban Development Authority guidelines, National Physical Planning Policy, Central Environmental Authority directives, local council by-laws.
But enforcement has collapsed.
Communities are now urging a radical shift. Several villages have openly declared:
“If politicians will not protect these mountains, we will fight to stop illegal hotels ourselves.”
In some parts of the hill country, residents have already begun petitioning the courts to demolish hazardous structures built on unstable ground.
The public’s memory may be short, but history is not.
Sri Lanka faced massive floods last year. In 2023, too. Before that, in 2021. Almost every year.
Officials from the Disaster Management Centre warn that flooding levels are rising:
“The only difference each monsoon is that the floods become bigger.”
Despite billions spent on rehabilitation, compensation and emergency relief, nothing structural has changed. At the end of each year:
The Treasury runs dry.
The State pays compensation to families who lost homes.
Politicians visit flood victims for photographs.
And then everything returns to normal until the next monsoon.
By 2025, the absurdity is painfully clear: Sri Lanka spends enormous sums every year paying for damage caused almost entirely by the country’s own short-sightedness.
As one academic at Moratuwa University summarised:
“We do not manage disasters — we manufacture them.”
This year’s destruction may finally force the country to rethink its development model.
Environmentalists argue that Sri Lanka must stop treating floods as unavoidable acts of nature and start recognising the human decisions that create them.
A long-term solution requires three immediate actions:
1. Enforce environmental laws without political interference
No politician, businessman or developer should be allowed to illegally build on wetlands, alter riverbanks, or erect hotels on unstable slopes. Violations must be prosecuted — not ignored, not “settled,” not excused.
2. Restore the natural drainage network
Canals, waterways, paddy fields and marshlands must be reclaimed and rehabilitated. Cities like Colombo need engineering interventions: expanded drainage capacity, flood retention lakes, strict stormwater management regulations and regular dredging.
3. Launch a nationwide behavioural campaign
Sri Lankans must be taught — urgently — that dumping waste into canals, blocking storm drains and filling marshes are not harmless shortcuts. They are acts that kill.
Several NGOs are now calling for public shaming of repeat offenders, CCTV monitoring of waterways, and strict fines for illegal landfill and garbage disposal.
It is easy to blame businessmen, politicians and corrupt officials. But Sri Lankan society itself must confront a difficult truth:
ordinary people also contribute to the destruction.
The villager who fills one marshland, the family who dumps garbage into the canal, the hotelier who carves into a mountain — they all form part of the chain that leads to today’s floods.
This is a cultural crisis as much as a political one.
The final irony is financial.
Every year, Sri Lankans pay some of the world’s highest indirect taxes — VAT, NBT, fuel levies, municipal taxes, environmental fees — with the implicit promise that the State will protect the public.
But 40% of those hard-earned earnings are effectively spent repairing flood damage that should never have happened in the first place.
Homes are rebuilt. Roads repaired. Relief packages distributed.
Next monsoon, the cycle repeats.
If nothing changes, Sri Lankans will continue working their whole lives only to fund the consequences of the country’s own environmental destruction.
Cyclone Ditwah has exposed the fragility of Sri Lanka’s towns and cities, but it has also provided an opportunity — a moment of clarity.
This disaster should be a national turning point.
The people know the causes. The experts know the solutions. The laws already exist. What is missing is political courage and public discipline.
If Sri Lanka fails to address the root causes now, the future is bleak:
higher floods, more landslides, heavier damage, and families paying again and again for mistakes that could have been prevented.
But if Sri Lanka chooses a different path — one guided by science, law and environmental responsibility — then the country can break free from this cycle of destruction.
Nature may bring the rain.
But whether that rain becomes a disaster —
that choice still belongs to us.
-By LeN Envionmental Correspondent
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by (2025-11-30 17:41:15)
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