Where warming hits hard
Threatened with encroaching seas, dwindling water supplies and fiercer storms, Bangladesh is already suffering the ill effects of rising global greenhouse gas emissions. Mason Inman reports on how the region is coping with climate change.
Ali Akbar Adi takes a break from steering his ox-driven plow across his small plot of land, digging furrows for a crop of lentils and beans. “When salt water comes in, the yields are very low,” he says.
Storm surges push this salty water up over the embankments around his field in the district of Bhola, an area that forms Bangladesh’s largest island and is situated the mouth of the vast Meghna river. “There are places to go, but we don’t feel as safe in them,” Adi says. “We feel protected here. But we’re afraid the embankment may break in the near future.”
For now, embankments like those protecting Adi’s field enclose much of Bangladesh’s coast, keeping out the tides and all but the worst storm surges. But for how long? Rising sea levels threaten to eat away at this embankment, just as they did last year, ripping a huge breach in another dike a few hundred metres away.
As temperatures rise, creeping seas levels are just one of the threats that could wreak havoc on the region — often referred to as ground zero for climate change — and unravel its recent economic and social progress.
Covered deep with silt from crumbling Himalayan mountains, carried downstream by the Ganges and Brahmaputra and hundreds of
smaller rivers that braid together across Bangladesh, this incredibly fertile land sprouts everywhere with green — rice stalks, palms, coconut trees and the vast swampy Sundarbans mangrove forest. The country now feeds itself, despite having almost 150 million mouths packed into an area the size of the US state of Iowa, giving it the world’s highest population density, outside of small island nations and citystates such as Singapore and Vatican City.
Although still poor, the country has left behind its earlier reputation as an “international basket case”, a term once unkindly bestowed on it by a US government official. Its economy is growing fast, the poverty rate is falling and the average lifespan has now stretched to 63 years.
Nature’s laboratory
Nonetheless, nature is harsh on Bangladesh. “We are nature’s laboratory on disasters,” says Ainun Nishat of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “We don’t have volcanoes. But any other natural disaster you think of, we have it.” The rivers swell with summer monsoons, filling Bangladesh’s vast flood-plain and submerging a quarter to a third of the land in a typical year — and up to two-thirds in the worst of years. Several cyclones usually tear through the heart of the country each year, drowning people in storm surges and ripping up trees and homes. Less sudden calamities — droughts in the country’s few highland areas, erosion of the river banks and coastlines — also rob people of food and land.
nature reports climate change | VOL 3 | FEBRUARY 2009 | www.nature.com/reports/climatechange
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