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  Business Times Singapore 23 Feb 07
Future of global warming has arrived in Bangladesh
Bad floods there have wiped out homes and paddy fields, and raised the salinity of water
By Henry Chu

GLOBAL warming has a taste in the Bangladeshi village of Bhamia. It is the taste of salt.

Only a few years ago, water from the local pond was fresh and sweet on Samit Biswas' tongue. It quenched his family's thirst and cleansed their bodies. But drinking a cupful now leaves a briny flavour in his mouth. Tiny white crystals sprout on Mr Biswas' skin after he bathes and in his clothes after his wife washes them.

The change, international scientists say, is the result of intensified flooding caused by shifting climate patterns. Warmer weather and rising oceans are sending seawater surging up Bangladesh's rivers in greater volume and frequency than ever before, experts say, overflowing and seeping into the soil and water supply of thousands of people.

Their lives are being squeezed by distant lands they have seen only on television - America, China and Russia at the top of the heap - whose carbon emissions are pushing temperatures and sea levels inexorably upwards.

Earlier this month, a long-awaited report by the United Nations said that global warming fuelled by human activity could lift temperatures by 8 degrees and the ocean's surface by 58 cm by 2100.

In south-west Bangladesh, the bleak future forecast by the report is already becoming a reality, bringing misery along with it.

Heavier-than-usual floods have wiped out homes and paddy fields. They have increased the salinity of the water, which is contaminating wells, killing trees, and slowly poisoning the mighty mangrove jungle that forms a natural barrier against the Bay of Bengal.

If sea levels continue to rise at their present rate, by the time Mr Biswas, 35, retires from his job as a teacher, the only home he has known will be swamped, overrun by the ocean with the force of an unstoppable army.

That, in turn, will trigger another kind of flood: millions of displaced residents desperate for a place to live.

'It will be a disaster,' Mr Biswas said. Bangladesh, a densely crowded and painfully poor nation, contributes only a minuscule amount to the greenhouse gases slowly smothering the planet.

But a combination of geography and demography puts it among the countries experts predict will be hardest hit as the Earth heats up.

Nearly 150 million people, the equivalent of about half the US population, live packed in an area the size of Iowa and about as flat. Home to where the mighty Brahmaputra, Ganges and Meghna rivers meet, most of Bangladesh is a vast delta of alluvial plains that are barely above sea level, making it prone to flooding from waterways swollen by rain, snowmelt from the Himalayas, and increased infiltration by the ocean.

Wreaking havoc

Global warming trends have already exacerbated that, and the situation will probably only get worse, scientists say.

'A little increase in temperature, a little climate change, has a magnified impact here,' said A Atiq Rahman, the director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies - the country's leading environmental research group - based in Dhaka, the capital. 'That's what makes the population here so vulnerable.'

Other low-lying countries are also at risk, such as the Netherlands and tiny islands in the South Pacific that could eventually be swallowed up by the expanding oceans. But the population of these countries is only a fraction of that of Bangladesh.

If the sea in Bangladesh rises by one-third of a metre, which some researchers say could happen by 2040, the resulting damage would set back progress there by 30 years, Mr Rahman said. Up to 12 per cent of the population would be made homeless.

A one-metre rise by century's end - a possible scenario if polar ice caps melt at a more rapid pace, would wreak havoc in Bangladesh on an apocalyptic, Atlantis-like scale, according to scientific projections and models.

A quarter of the country would be submerged. Dhaka, now in the centre of the nation, would sit within 95 km of the coast, where boats would float over the drowned remnants of countless town squares, markets, houses and schools. As many as 30 million people would become refugees in their own land, many of them subsistence farmers with nothing to subsist on any longer. 'Tomorrow's poverty will be far worse than today's,' Mr Rahman said.

For years, the government there either denied or downplayed the danger posed by global warming. Bangladesh is hardly unique in that regard; many accuse the US of doing the same.

Mr Rahman recalls overhearing officials ridicule him as a madman when he warned that Bangladesh risked being permanently inundated.

But the weight of scientific opinion has grown, as has evidence that climate patterns are already shifting and producing harmful effects in the region. Politicians who had previously dismissed global warming as a far-off problem are starting to see it as a clear and present danger.

'Part of it is sheer reality hitting you on the head - there are stronger floods, more frequent floods,' Mr Rahman said. 'Now the game is much clearer. The connection ... has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.'

Three years ago, the government set up a climate-change unit in its Environment Ministry, but it employs only a handful of staff and depends largely on the British government for funding.

Officials have also lately begun appealing to wealthy, fossil-fuel-consuming nations such as Japan and the countries of the European Union to help Bangladesh prepare for a catastrophe it has precious few resources to combat.

'Lives in Bangladesh will be devastated through no fault of the people concerned,' Sabihuddin Ahmed, the ambassador to Britain and a former Environment Ministry official, wrote in the Guardian newspaper last September.

For folks in the West, Mr Ahmed said, the onslaught of global warming may seem decades away.

In Bangladesh, 'the future has arrived'. In the coastal south-west, in an area called Munshiganj close to the Indian border and the famed Sundarbans mangrove forest, grizzled farmers describe the relentless encroachment of the sea.

Thirty years ago, an embankment built to hem in the tidal rivers around them was sufficient to protect villagers from major inundations. Now, they estimate that the high-tide mark has climbed by three metres, and breaches such as one that happened last September, which swamped hundreds of homes, have become depressingly common.

'The water came up to here,' said Iman Ali Gain, sweeping his hand up to his chest as scores of men behind him hauled baskets of gloppy gray soil to repair the dike. 'We were afraid when we saw it.'

Mr Gain, 65, once grew rice to support himself and his family, but his harvests started shrinking as saline levels in the water went up. To cope, he followed the example of many of his neighbours and switched over to shrimp farming, a way to take advantage of the salty water washing over the fields.

For the first time, shrimp farming occupies more of the cultivable land than traditional crops in the area around Bhamia.

While the shift has enabled some villagers to survive, it has also created other headaches. Less labour-intensive, shrimp farming has wound up boosting unemployment. Thousands of residents have migrated to other parts of Bangladesh or India in search of work.

Worse yet, deliberately trapping so much briny water to raise shrimp has increased the sodium concentration in the soil, which aggravates the salinity creeping into drinking-water supplies.

'From ancient times, our people used (local) ponds for drinking water. Now they need to go four to five kilometres to collect sweet water,' said Mohon Kumar Mondal, 31, a local environmental activist and geographer with a master's degree who is trying to promote awareness of and adaptation to climate change.

Residents report an increase in health problems such as diarrhoea, skin diseases and dysentery. The salty water has also choked many of the palm and date trees that once lent a fecund beauty to the sun-baked landscape.

'I request people, please understand the situation of the Earth. Please make your decisions according to the situation,' Mr Mondal said. 'And please think of poor people like us, who have not created greenhouse gases. Please think of our situation.' - LAT-WP
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