Bangladesh is a land of water. Its alluvial rivers rush down from the Himalayas, emptying into a maze of lakes, wetlands and tributaries before emptying into the black, windswept Bay of Bengal.
Now, its deepest threat is water, in its many terrible incarnations: drought, flood, tornado, saltwater. All are exacerbated to varying degrees by climate change, and all are forcing millions of people to do whatever they can to steer clear of it.
This is important for the rest of the world, because what the 170 million people of this crowded low-lying lowland nation face today is what many of us will face tomorrow. Tomorrow.
People in Bangladesh are rushing to harvest rice as soon as they receive news of heavy rain upstream. They are building beds of floating water hyacinth to grow vegetables out of the reach of floodwaters. In places where shrimp farms have made the soil too salty for farming, they are growing okra and tomatoes not in the soil but in compost, stuffed into the plastic containers that once held the shrimp. In places where the land was washed away, people had to move to other villages and towns. And in places where even drinking water is exhausted, they are learning to drink every drop of rain.
Saber Hossain Chowdhury, a ruling party lawmaker and the prime minister’s climate envoy, compared his country’s efforts to sealing a leaky barrel. “It’s like when you have a drum with seven leaks and you have two hands,” he said. “What do you do? It’s not an easy thing.”
Bangladesh has succeeded in saving many lives in cyclones and floods. But there are many other challenges to tackle at the same time: finding new sources of drinking water for millions along the coast, expanding crop insurance, preparing cities for the inevitable influx of migrants. from the countryside, even cultivating good relations with neighboring countries. share weather data.
All this, with little help from the rich countries of the world. There is growing frustration in places like Bangladesh that rich nations have not provided the funds that developing countries need to adapt to the dangers they have faced. It’s a topic of This week’s Paris Climate Finance Summit.
Of Bangladesh’s 64 districts, half are considered vulnerable to climate change.
Early warning system
In mid-April, Rakibul Alam, an extension worker in the northern lowlands, received a warning from his boss in the nearest city, Sunamganj, who had been warned by his superiors in the capital, Dhaka.
Mr. Alam was told there could be heavy rain in northeastern India in the next few weeks, which could cause floodwaters to overflow across the border submerging fields in his area just as the rice is ripening.
He knew he had to convince local farmers to harvest as much rice as possible as quickly as possible. And that means helping them overcome the psychological barrier. Even in an area prone to flash floods, farmers still want to squeeze a lot of rice from their small plots. “They want to wait until the grain is 100% ripe for the best yield,” said Alam.
This year, he knew, the wait could be a disaster.
Mr. Alam turned to his local network. Calls and messages were sent to farmers’ union leaders. Volunteers go from village to village with cow horns. Imams use their mosque speakers. The message is straightforward: Flash floods may come, rice harvest is almost done, don’t wait.
To Alam’s relief, the farmers heeded the warning. They work non-stop, even during the holidays of Eid al-Fitr. By April 25, most of the fields had been cleared.
Luckily, this time, the rain wasn’t heavy and there were no flash floods — but the crops were still protected.
It’s a dry spell, so to speak, as it is likely to happen more often as climate change causes more rain and increases the risk of flash floods in these lowlands. It is also an extension of the early warning system used to keep people out of harm’s way when a storm hits the coast. This time, it is used to save a harvest.
The government, for its part, has an ambitious national adaptation plan with costly projects, such as dredging silt in rivers and building embankments to block the sea.
But much of that has yet to be done, and critics say major infrastructure jobs pose the risk of mismanagement and bribery. “The climate gap is there,” said Zakir Hossain Khan, climate finance analyst for a local nonprofit group Change Initiative. “Also, the corruption loophole.”
Floating Garden and Tiger Track
What will you do when the rivers rise and drown your crops?
If you were Shakti Kirtanya, you would grow crops on water. If the water rises, they also rise. They float and float. He said: “If you see the harvest, your heart will be filled with joy.
Mr. Kirtanya learned this farming technique from his father, who learned it from him. It has been done for 200 years in his low-lying district, Gopalganj, where the land is usually flooded for half a year.
Now, because climate change is making the risk of flooding spread to many other areas, the Gopalganj floating gardens are spreading more and more. For the past five years, the government has supported floating gardens in 24 of the country’s 64 counties.
Mr. Kirtanya uses what he has. He cut hyacinth branches in the lake near his house, dried the piles in the sun and then molded them into long, wide beds on the water. He sows watermelon and amaranth in the summer, cabbage and cauliflower in the winter. The garden is a source of income and for his family a source of fresh produce grown without chemicals.
“It doesn’t matter if it rains late or early,” Mr. Kirtanya said. “It doesn’t hurt in the heat either.”
There is a looming threat. Sea water is moving deeper inland. Part of that is due to sea level rise, which causes high tides. Part of that is because rivers have been dammed upstream and not enough fresh water flows down. Part of that is due to too much groundwater being pulled up.
Mr. Kirtanya glimpsed a salty future last year. Leaves turn red. Plants become weak.
That salty future is already present in the 3,860-square-mile mangrove forest, the Sundarbans, on the edge of the Bay of Bengal.
Forests are the country’s main defense against high tides. The roots of the chayote tree, the mangrove tree for which the forest is named, protrude from the mud like the fingers of a dead man. Tigers leave their tracks in the ground.
Today, the almost unthinkable is happening. The water is getting too salty for sundari. They are dying. Other mangrove species are taking over. The The landscape is changing. Likely forever.
“I don’t think sundari will come back unless the salinity goes down,” said Nazrul Islam, the son of a forester who grew up in the area and now runs river tours in the forest. “And I don’t see the possibility of salinity reduction.”
Rain Shooting
Sheela Biswas faces a saltwater crisis every day. Salt has infiltrated the canals and ponds her village relies on for drinking and washing. An estimated 30 million people living along the coast face different levels of saltwater intrusion. The area where Ms. Biswas lives has been one of the hardest hit.
It wasn’t like this when she got married 30 years ago. After that, most people eat the rice that they grow on their land. They drink the water they get in their pond.
Then came “white gold”, shrimp. Shrimp farm spread out. People let salt water through the canal from the river, so the salt water also overflowed. Miss Biswas’ pond became too salty to drink.
First, she rented a trolley to buy water. She then turned to a neighbor who had built an underground tank to collect rainwater. She invented her own rainwater collection system using what she had at home, fitting plastic pipes to direct rainwater from her tin roof through fishing nets and into earthen jars. She still had to bathe in her saltwater pond, which caused a rash on her skin, a common disease in the area. Doctors said the rate of hypertension is also high; They suspect their patients are inadvertently eating too much salt.
The latest solution to Ms. Biswas’ problem is a hot pink 2,000-liter plastic water tank, equivalent to about 530 gallons, with a filter on top. It sits in her yard to catch the monsoon rains, one of nearly 4,000 such tanks distributed over the past three years by the development organization BRAC, which helps the poor.
Shrimp is no longer yellowish white. Intensive shrimp production has brought new risks, including disease that reduces profits. Some of her neighbors have started building shrimp ponds, filling them with sand and waiting for rain to wash away the salt underneath.
That is rare. Most of the people here have very little land and they cannot leave it alone for it to recover. They were trapped. “They can’t rely on shrimp and they can’t change,” Ms. Biswas said.
Even if they could, sea level rise, combined with land subsidence for other reasons, now threatens to exacerbate the threat of salt in the water. If the land subsides, sea level rise even a little is very dangerous. The embankment sometimes collapses due to the rising tide, which is getting stronger and stronger.
Like Mrs. Biswas, the people of the southwestern coast of this country have found ways to jostle for drinking water.
Some entrepreneurs are selling water that they desalinate using small reverse osmosis systems in their homes, but that end up dumping salty slime into nearby ponds. Some are moving to the busy port town of Mongla, but there is also a shortage of fresh water.
Farther south, where the soil is too salty for farming, women have begun growing vegetables in pots filled with compost and manure. Or they turn empty rice bags into plant pots, even plastic boxes that used to carry shrimp to the market.
Their sloppy efforts to secure the most basic of human needs, food and water, is a glimpse into the epic struggle of hundreds of millions of people trying to cope with danger. climate risk every day.
Adaptation money, $29 billion for all developing countries by 2020, is just a fraction of what is needed: at least $160 billion a year, according to United Nations estimates. This explains the anger of developing country leaders in international climate politics.
Unless global emissions fall rapidly and dramatically, Bangladesh can do little to stay above the surface, said Chowdhury, the legislator. “Whatever we do will not be enough,” he said.
Julfikar Ali Manik Reporting contributions from Bangladesh.
