Rising sea levels could flood 17 per cent of the country — or erode the land — and create between 20 million and 30 million refugees, experts say.
CHAKBARA, BANGLADESH—It is hard to imagine Shamisur Gazi sprinting up a tree. He is 86, has a hump on his back and, at the best of times, he needs a cane to walk.
But people do extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances.
On May 25, 2009, a few hours before Cyclone Aila hit Bangladesh and India, Gazi remembers the rain — it was relentless, it came down in brown sheets and visibility was barely two metres.
The wind was fierce, but toward mid-afternoon, it suddenly picked up more momentum and began toppling houses and hurling fences. Within minutes, Gazi knew that if he didn’t find refuge, he would be blown away.
Gazi climbed a palm tree.
He doesn’t remember how he did it or how long it took. But he did it. He stayed there for six hours as the wind howled and giant waves surged.
When he climbed down, his coastal village in southwest Bangladesh had changed forever: houses were decimated, livestock drowned. The village was submerged.
Four years later, Gazi is still there. The houses have been rebuilt, as has the school, but the population has dwindled to about 500 from 800 before Aila.
Many of those gone are men, who have left behind women, children and elders. They work as labourers or pull rickshaws in nearby towns such as Jessore, Satkhira and Khulna; the enterprising ones have gone to the capital, Dhaka, to work in construction. Yet others have crossed the border to India, where they live in fear of being exposed as illegal immigrants and thrown into prison.
It is the same story in nearby villages, and in much of rural southwest Bangladesh.
Gazi’s two sons are in Dhaka with their families. Gazi is clinging to village life the way he did the palm tree. It is the only existence he knows, but he realizes he soon may not have a choice but to leave. “Climate change has wrecked everything,” he says. “Our people are living in other towns and cities, like refugees.”
Climate change means higher temperatures, more rain, stronger winds. It will trigger a migration unlike anything the world has seen.
As it gradually render parts of Asia and Africa uninhabitable, as many as 250 million people — seven times the population of Canada — will be forced to move by 2050, experts predict.
They will go from deserts to places where water is less scarce, the land not so arid; from coasts, they will move inland, where they are safe from cyclones and tidal waves. They will move from flatlands to higher ground, where sudden storm surges don’t flood their villages and destroy farmland with salt water.
They will leave to look for jobs and for safety.
They will migrate to neighbouring towns and cities; some will leave for neighbouring countries. Some will also leave for countries far away. But they will leave — they won’t have a choice.
The worst-case scenario is predicted for the Maldives and other small islands in the Pacific. Those islands will disappear, as early as the end of this century.
It is already happening: the sea level has risen 20 centimetres in the past century in the Maldives, say scientists who fear in another 100 years, it will rise an additional 56 centimetres.
But the biggest migration is expected to be in Bangladesh.
Rising sea levels, a result of melting glaciers, could flood 17 per cent of the country — or erode the land — and create between 20 million and 30 million refugees by 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (IPCC is a scientific body assessing climate change for more than 190 countries. The panel shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. vice president Al Gore.)
Bangladesh also faces more extreme weather patterns: monsoon rains are already shorter and fiercer; the periods of drought longer. Tornadoes and cyclones are more powerful, more devastating.
“All this could happen faster because of lack of reduction of greenhouse gases,” says Atiq Rahman, one of the authors of the IPCC report. “And even if we stopped now, it would take a lot of time for things to get better.”
Rahman lives in Dhaka. His office in the chic Gulshan neighbourhood is crammed with dozens of maps and graphs showing Bangladesh’s predicament.
He uses one to explain why Bangladesh is Ground Zero: geographically, the country is flat, especially in the south. Its 150 million people live in the delta of three mighty rivers — the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna — and the majority of the country sits a scant six metres above sea level; some coastal areas are barely three to four metres above sea level. By the end of the century, experts say part of the country could be under water.
But the issue is not just disappearing land. According to the IPCC, rising sea levels will wipe out more cultivated land in Bangladesh than anywhere else in the world. By 2050, rice production — a dietary staple in the country — is expected to drop almost 10 per cent and wheat production as much as 30 per cent. That’s a huge risk for a population that is poor and growing. Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh and one of the authors of the IPCC report, says climate change poses a quadruple whammy for Bangladesh.
The country faces rising sea levels in the south, more annual flooding in the central region because of stronger monsoons, drought in the northwest, and inadequate water for rice production, due to a shorter monsoon season, in the east.
“We face (climate change) challenges in every corner of the country,” says Huq. “The convergence of climate-related factors has created the ultimate storm here.”
It is a storm that Bangladesh didn’t create, but one it will have to deal with.
Cyclone Aila certainly wasn’t the first cyclone to hit Bangladesh.
Every year, there are typhoons, there are cyclones. Most of the land is barely above sea level; every storm sweeps across the country without obstacles and tidal surges batter the coast. People lose everything: their animals, their crops, their homes.
In the past, resilient Bangladeshis would have built new huts, bought more livestock, stockpiled food and carried on.
But Aila was different.
It hit the country less than 18 months after Cyclone Sidr, which inhaled dozens of villages, killed hundreds and flooded coastal regions. People were still picking up the pieces when Aila struck.
Aila killed 300 people, inundated dozens of villages with a three-metre storm surge and destroyed 4,000 kilometres of roads and embankments.
It also brought in saline water from the Bay of Bengal, making the soil unfit for agriculture, the livelihood of most rural people.
That saline water never receded.
“There was no choice . . . people had to leave,” says Majid Khan, 52.
He lives in Baringa, a village of about 600 in southwest Bangladesh, less than a kilometre from a river that makes its way into the Bay of Bengal. It is like every village near the coast: there are mud-caked huts, children in tattered clothes on the streets, fields that no one plows anymore and fish ponds where no one fishes.
In Baringa, villagers used to earn a living growing rice or gathering fish eggs in ponds scattered throughout the village.
Saline water wrecked even that.
Before Aila made landfall, Khan and his four sons earned a “good living” collecting fish eggs. “We were OK, we were happy . . . everyone lived in the same house,” says Khan, wiping away tears. After Sidr, they tried fishing in the sea but never caught enough; then they lost their fishing net in a storm.
A few months after Aila, three of his four sons left with their wives: two went to Dhaka, one to Jessore. Two work in construction, one pulls a rickshaw. It is a rough life and they hate what they are doing, says Khan. “This (the village) is their life, this is what they wanted to always do. . . .”
Khan, too, almost left. But he couldn’t abandon his 90-year-old mother.
He walks out to see the Bay of Bengal every day. From his vantage point, there are signs the water is rising. “Look at those,” he says, pointing at stone steps leading to a mud hut near a bank. When he was growing up, he could count 15; now, it is just a dozen.
Khan is no scientist or climatologist but he knows something is happening.
“I don’t think my great grandkids will see their village . . . It will be gone,” he says.
Salt has contaminated the drinking water supply. Aid workers say water-related illnesses are rising. Malaria is up, so is dengue fever. Research shows elevated incidence of high blood pressure, especially among women, and problems during childbirth.
In nearby Gabura, Roshan Ara, a shy 34-year-old, says she left the village when grey sludge deposited by Aila destroyed her shrimp ponds. The same thing happened to hundreds of thousands of shrimp ponds in the area, she says.
She moved to Satkhira, a town of narrow streets, chaotic traffic and shanties about 120 kilometres inland. A farmer’s daughter and a farmer herself, Ara now works as domestic help and earns less than $15 a month. She sends half of it to her parents.
“I want nothing more than to come back here, but I don’t think it will ever happen,” she says, throwing her hands up in despair during a visit to Gabura. “Because villages like mine will disappear. What did we do wrong?”
Bangladeshis, like others in developing countries, are least responsible for climate change but among the worst affected by it.
In Bangladesh, the issues are compounded by population density and poverty, says James Pender, a missionary who wrote an exhaustive paper in 2010 on Bangladesh and the impact of climate change. The country’s dependence on agriculture makes it much more vulnerable, he says.
About 35 per cent of the population lives under the poverty line of $1 a day, and about 40 per cent depend on agriculture for a living.
(Pender has lived in Bangladesh for years and has focused on climate change adaptation.)
Food production will be “particularly sensitive to climate change, because crop yields depend directly on climatic conditions,” wrote Pender. In tropical areas, even a tiny increase in warming will reduce the harvest. Higher temperatures will lead to large declines in wheat and rice production around the world.
Bangladesh is one of the world’s most densely populated countries at about 1,200 people per square kilometre. (In Canada, it’s 3.7 people per square kilometre.) With so many people, it can scarcely afford to lose farmland. Lost land means less land for a growing population and less farmland to feed them.
But not everyone agrees with such dire predictions.
“There is an emerging pattern but it is tough to say how much land (will become submerged), how many people will move,” says Babar Kabir, senior director of disaster environment and climate change with BRAC, the world’s largest NGO, which has offices in every district in Bangladesh.
“(Migration) is not happening to the degree we think it is.”
He is sitting in his ninth floor office at the BRAC building in Dhaka. But Kabir spends a lot of time in coastal villages, where residents are being taught new livelihoods.
For instance, after Cyclone Sidr, BRAC gave rice farmers money to buy tiny crabs, which were fattened up and sold back for export to other Asian countries. “The project did well,” says Kabir. “It showed other uses for land if it can’t grow crops.”
But he knows people are moving to higher, safer ground.
All migration is “not climate-change related,” he argues; there is economic migration, too. “People are leaving certain areas where they can no longer sustain a living,” he says.
Still, he concedes that agriculture affected by changing weather patterns is a main reason for these migrations.
While rising seas and eroding soil may be eating into this country’s land, some scientists point out that more than one billion tonnes of sediment has been brought into the delta by the Himalayan rivers. The sediment can counter the rise in sea levels, says Maminul Haque Sarker, executive director of the Centre for Environment and Geographic Information Services in Dhaka.
After the IPCC’s doomsday report, the agency conducted its own research and concluded much of the country’s coastline will survive. “Sediment plays a role in the growth, it always has in this country,” says Sarker. “They have shaped our coast for thousands of years.”
Rahman acknowledges the IPCC report did not include the impact of sediment deposit, but he discounts its impact.
“Even if sediments save some part of the coast from going under water, that area can never be used for agriculture,” he says. “There is too much turbulence there.” There is another kind of turbulence in coastal villages.
It is a social change that bothers Pintu Bhai.
Bhai, 51, lives in the sprawling village of Munshiganj, about five kilometres from the coast, and runs a grassroots environmental group. He regularly visits coastal villages and worries about the skewed gender ratio, and the women left behind.
He says some women are abandoned because the men never return. Children are growing up without their fathers.
Lately, armed bandits have been stealing livestock from these areas. “They know there are few men left so no one will fight back,” Bhai says. “It’s dangerous.”
Then there are prowling tigers from the adjacent Sundarbans mangrove forest, believed to be one of the largest reserves in the world for the endangered Bengal tiger.
Tigers rarely used to leave the forest, but changing tide patterns have driven away some of their prey and made it easier and necessary for them to roam. Now, they sometimes come to the villages at night. There are supposed to be tiger lookouts, but Bhai says there are not enough people to stand guard.
But humans are also invading tigers’ space. As traditional livelihoods have dwindled, some villagers have taken to gathering wild honey in the thick of the Sundarbans forest.
Mohammad Robiul Islam, 35, lost a cousin to a tiger two years ago. “He was in the forest when he was attacked,” says Islam.The death hasn’t deterred other villagers from venturing into the forest to earn the equivalent of a few dollars a month.
There aren’t many other ways to earn a living here, says Islam. “You either move to the cities or live here and take risks.”
Back in Chakbara, Gazi also faces an impossible choice: to leave the land where he was born, raised and spent more than eight decades, or move to the city to be with his children and grandchildren.
Life has become harder in the past few years, but he knows it could be even tougher in the city. And he would also miss the tempestuous Bay of Bengal, he says.
A warm, good-natured man with a short beard and a wry smile, he says he would have liked his sons to stay in his village.
“All I wanted was to grow old with my children and their children. But now they are gone and I don’t think they will ever return.”
The palm tree, the one that saved his life during Aila, is still there.
Source: The Star