I’ve not attended to Bangladesh’s climate change derived water crisis in some time. Whether I’ve been right or wrong, I’ve principally attended only to the political bearings that have supported the two main opposing parties. Happily, Sebastian Strangio a journalist writing for Foreign Policy Magazine has written up an excellent piece about climate change in Bangladesh that points out all the ways Bangladeshis are making the best of a very bad deal.
Consider Strangio’s introductory paragraph. It attacks, straight to the jugular, the impact that rising waters will have on Bangladesh’s foreign relations with its neighbors:
“Earlier this year, a small island in the Bay of Bengal vanished, taking with it a long-running territorial dispute between neighbors India and Bangladesh. The uninhabited sandbar, known variously as South Talpatti and New Moore Island, had been hotly contested since the 1980s. But in March, as the island was submerged by rising sea levels, the dispute quietly resolved itself. The rising waters were ‘definitely attributable to climate change, oceanographer Sugata Hazra at India’s Jadavpur University, told the Associated Press. ‘What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking has been resolved by global warming.'”
Rising waters will cut down the land available to Bangladeshis to live their hard fought lives. Unlike many cities in many countries, Bangladeshis have been forced to live with the ebb and flow of climate change. Melting waters sliding down from the Himayalas help flood the delta basin on which the country’s borders have been carved. Flood waters have washed away entire villages; survivors have had to rejigger their lives back into some sensible facsimile of their former constitution.
Thus Strangio writes:
“Bangladesh’s environmental measures began in the 1970s, when the country started developing saline-resistant varieties of rice and other crops. The country built flood embankments to prevent low-lying arable land from being flooded with salt water. And as a result, grain production rose from 9 million tons in the mid-1970s to 28 million tons today, according to government figures. Today, agriculture in Bangladesh is as “climate proof” as anywhere. And more recently, the British-backed Chars Livelihood Program has funded the construction of flood-resistant infrastructure on Bangladesh’s riverine islands, or chars, where some 3.5 million people reside.”
