Seas ‘threaten 20m in Bangladesh’

By David Shukman, BBC News, Bangladesh 7 September 2009

Up to 20 million people in low-lying Bangladesh are at risk from rising sea levels in the coming decades, according to new research.

Scientists predict that salty water could reach far inland, making it hard to cultivate staple foods like rice.

The research comes as the government appeals for $5bn (£3bn) over five years to combat climate change.

In May, Cyclone Aila left thousands homeless, killed many and caused widespread flooding and damage.

The predictions come from the Centre for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (Cegis) in Bangladesh.

It suggests a surprisingly small area of land will be permanently lost to the waters, but notes that vast tracts in the south-west could be inundated every monsoon season.

Food threats

Ahmadul Hassan, a senior scientist at Cegis, told the BBC that the intrusion of salt water would disrupt rice production in one of Bangladesh’s poorest regions.

“These are very poor people, and vulnerable. For four months they’ll have nowhere to work,” he said.

“So people will migrate to the cities for jobs, because of the uncomfortable situation with sea level rise.

“We are talking about 20 million people,” he adds.

According to the researchers, data from 11 Bangladeshi monitoring stations shows an average sea-level rise of 5mm per year over the last 30 years, with climate models forecasting further rises.

Of Bangladesh’s total rice production, nearly half is so-called “monsoon” rice and much of that is grown in the areas most vulnerable to flooding.

In an interview with BBC News, Bangladesh’s Minister of Disaster Management, Dr Muhammed Abdur Razzaque, said he wanted sea defences similar to those in Holland.

“We have to have new designs for embankments and we have to raise their height,” he said.

“We are expecting $5bn over the next five years in support from the international community.

“This must be a grant, not a loan with interest,” he stipulated.

Bangladesh is among a number of developing countries campaigning for finance to help adapt to the effects of climate change.

There are hopes that the richest nations will agree to massive funding at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December.

Staff from the charity Oxfam point to the damage caused by Cyclone Aila last May to highlight why Bangladesh needs help preparing for future sea-level rise.

Abdul Khaleque is managing Oxfam’s emergency response in Satkhira region, where more than 20,000 people lost their homes on Gabura Island.

He said: “This place is very near to the sea and we know climate change is causing sea levels to rise.

“If the situation gets worse then these people cannot go back to their villages, so permanent arrangements to improve these embankments need to be made.

Defences breached

Four months after the cyclone, the sea defences are still breached and the island floods with every high tide.

The chairman of the Gabura Island “union” or council, Shofiul Ajam Lenin, is calling for the embankments to be far higher.

“If the current design is not changed then not only my union, but the other unions as well will not exist.”

The flooding has ruined the island’s freshwater supplies and hygiene in the camp is poor.

Among those living in tents on a narrow strip of high ground is Asma Khatun, a 25-year-old widow, who is now eager to leave.

“I think it is not possible to live in this country any longer. We have to move to other countries.

“We can’t live here just by drinking this water. It is not possible to live here.”

Climate Driven Migration Has Begun

Climate and Capitalism, June 15, 2009

Forecasts of environmental migration vary widely – the intergovernmental International Organization for Migration estimates that 200 million people will be displaced by 2050, while the respected charity Christian Aid predicts 700 million in the same time frame. More important than specific 40-year forecasts is the conclusion of In Search of Shelter that climate change is “already causing migration and displacement.”

The report, jointly produced by the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security; CARE International, and Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, says that the scope and scale of climate-induced migration will “could vastly exceed anything that has occurred before,” and that “people in the least developed countries and island states will be affected first and worst.”

The following points are from the report’s Executive Summary. The full In Search of Shelter report can be downloaded from here or here.

• Climate change is already contributing to displacement and migration. Although economic and political factors are the dominant drivers of displacement and migration today, climate change is already having a detectable effect.
• The breakdown of ecosystem-dependent livelihoods is likely to remain the premier driver of long-term migration during the next two to three decades. Climate change will exacerbate this situation unless vulnerable populations, especially the poorest, are assisted in building climate-resilient livelihoods.
• Disasters continue to be a major driver of shorter-term displacement and migration. As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural hazards such as cyclones, floods, and droughts, the number of temporarily displaced people will rise. This will be especially true in countries that fail to invest now in disaster risk reduction and where the official response to disasters is limited.
• Seasonal migration already plays an important part in many families’ struggle to deal with environmental change. This is likely to become even more common, as is the practice of migrating from place to place in search of ecosystems that can still support rural livelihoods.
• Glacier melt will affect major agricultural systems in Asia. As the storage capacity of glaciers declines, short-term flood risks increase. This will be followed by decreasing water flows in the medium- and long-term. Both consequences of glacier melt would threaten food production in some of the world’s most densely populated regions.
• Sea level rise will worsen saline intrusions, inundation, storm surges, erosion, and other coastal hazards. The threat is particularly grave vis-à-vis island communities. There is strong evidence that the impacts of climate change will devastate subsistence and commercial agriculture on many small islands.
• In the densely populated Ganges, Mekong, and Nile River deltas, a sea level rise of 1 meter could affect 23.5 million people and reduce the land currently under intensive agriculture by at least 1.5 million hectares. A sea level rise of 2 meters would impact an additional 10.8 million people and render at least 969 thousand more hectares of agricultural land unproductive.
• Many people won’t be able to flee far enough to adequately avoid the negative impacts of climate change-unless they receive support. Migration requires resources (including financial, social, and political capital) that the most vulnerable populations frequently don’t have. Case studies indicate that poorer environmental migrants can find their destinations as precarious as the places they left behind.

Cyclone Aila’s death toll is misleading

According to the United Nations, some 262 million people were affected by natural disasters annually between 2000 and 2004, over 98 per cent of them in the developing world, writes Mahtab Haider*

NewAge, May 29, 2009

EVEN as the death toll from this week’s cyclone Aila inches upwards as communications are restored in affected areas, it is obvious that the total number of deaths will not be nearly a tenth of the numbers killed in cyclone Sidr in 2007. And yet, the devastation that Aila has caused, a month after cyclone Bijli tore through coastal villages and a year and a half since the devastation of cyclone Sidr, brings home an important lesson: perceiving the ferocity of cyclones by their death toll can be tremendously misleading when a community’s coping capacity is worn thin, as they are repeatedly buffeted by extreme natural events.
   

The reality is, cyclone Aila has not had a fraction of the international media coverage that cyclone Sidr had received even though for hundreds of thousands of families in the coastal zone, this week may well be the tipping point that will see them driven to penury or astronomical debt in trying to recover from what was deemed to be a moderate cyclone. The reasons are simple. Coastal communities are no strangers to cyclones. They have lived with them for centuries and they have an organic ability to bounce back after an extreme weather event, with the help of savings, enterprise, and resilience. The problem is: the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones is gradually on the rise, largely as a result of man-made global warming and rising sea surface temperatures, wearing down the organic coping capacities of these communities, and seeing them slip deeper and deeper into poverty.
   

Over the past three years, rising food costs have taken their toll on marginal and small farming families across Bangladesh, their economic misery compounded by two back-to-back floods in 2007 and cyclone Sidr to end the year with another massive destruction of standing crops. These manifold crises have often compelled farming families either to sell of their small landholdings or their farming implements to survive – along with the attendant realities of pulling children out of schools and sending them to work as agricultural labour or in the cities. What all this means is that these hundreds of thousands of families have suffered an economic setback that may take more than two generations to recover from – as it is only their children’s children who might have an opportunity to go back to school. The economic and social consequence of this series of back-to-back events is that many of the development goals that governments, not just in Bangladesh, but across the world have set for themselves, including the Millennium Development Goals, will be confronted with dead ends as changing weather patterns undo much of the good that development policies and practices are achieving.
   

Bangladesh, though it shares this plight with many other countries, faces a tremendous development challenge in the decades to come. A study of global climate change risk hotspots by the aid agency CARE reveals that we face some of the highest levels of risk in terms of a rising incidence of floods, droughts as well as cyclones. While scientists refuse to attribute any particular weather event to climate change – it is scientifically sound that the trends in changing weather patterns are not only confirming the reality of man-made climate change but also indicating that patterns are changing at a speed and with greater severity than predicted. According to last year’s annual UN Human Development Report, ‘sea levels could rise rapidly with accelerated ice sheet disintegration. Global temperature increases of 3–4°C could result in 330 million people being permanently or temporarily displaced through flooding.’ Over 70 million these displaced are predicted to be in Bangladesh alone.
   

For Bangladesh, one of the biggest casualties of climate change is going to be agriculture and food security. As armies of small farmers find it increasingly difficult to cope with unpredictable weather patterns and failing crops, they will often be compelled to sell their landholdings, destroying the foundations of traditional food security in the rural economy. In aggregate too, countries like Bangladesh will produce less and less of its own food – with the small farmer who constitutes the backbone of food production on the retreat, plunging those millions of families that will not have the means of buying imported staples into deeper malnutrition. According to the UNHDR, the additional ranks of the malnourished could rise by 600 million by the year 2080. Side by side, drought affected areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, could rise between 60-90 million hectares at a cost of over $26 billion, which is more than the total current aid that goes to the region. As if that were not enough, seven of Asia’s great rivers will initially experience rising water levels resulting in floods as a result of glacial in the Himalayan range, before they start drying up – causing unimaginable devastation in the deltas they flow through.
   

The reality is that the worst excesses of this fallout from global warming and climate change will be felt in some of the poorest regions of the world, to the very people who are far removed from the industrial and consumption excesses that are responsible for greenhouse gases and unsustainable energy use. According to the UN, some 262 million people were affected by natural disasters annually between 2000 and 2004, over 98 per cent of them in the developing world. In the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development on in 1,500 people were affected by natural disasters. In the developing world the comparable statistic was 1 in 19. It is for these reasons that the heads of state meeting in Copenhagen later this year to negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol must act decisively and with the political will necessary to avert an mitigate and adapt to a disaster of global proportions.


*Mahtab Haider writes for NewAge, a leading english daily in Dhaka. 

E-mail: mahtabhaider@gmail.com

Effective cyclone evacuation measures save countless lives

Source: IRIN

DHAKA, 27 May 2009 (IRIN) – Relief efforts for victims of Cyclone Aila in Bangladesh are continuing, the country’s Disaster Management Bureau (DMB) says, but effective early warning systems and evacuation measures seem to have saved countless lives.

Map: IFRC

“The initial requirement is food, clothing, shelter and safe drinking water. We are doing our best to ensure that the affected people receive those as soon as possible,” DMB head Mohammad Farhad Uddin told IRIN on 27 May.

The government is delivering clothing, water purification tablets, as well as food assistance to those affected, while the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) has dispatched some 700 medical teams to the field.

With technical support from the World Health Organization (WHO), the DGHS will also undertake a rapid needs assessment to assess the healthcare situation on the ground.

A large number of international agencies and NGOs on the ground are also working with the government.

British-based charity Muslim Aid has dispatched water purification units and half a million water purification tablets to Bagerhat District, as well as teams to Pirojpur, Patuakhali and Satkhira with food and clothing.

With winds of up to 90km per hour, Aila swept across eastern India and southern Bangladesh on 25 May, affecting millions and leaving more than 150 dead, mostly in low-lying Bangladesh.

In Bangladesh alone, the category one storm affected more than three million people and left 81 confirmed dead, with more than 800 people injured, according to the latest DMB information.

Fourteen of the country’s 64 districts – all of them coastal – were affected, Satkhira being hardest hit with at least 25 deaths.

But with information still coming in and communications only now being restored, many believe the death toll could rise. According to local media reports, over 500 people are missing, many believed to be fishermen at sea when the cyclone struck.

Mass evacuation

Some 600,000 people were evacuated to cyclone shelters prior to the cyclone – a significant factor in minimising the loss of life.

Many of those in the shelters whose homes were not destroyed are reportedly now returning home. At the same time, thousands more remain stranded in their villages due to flooding.

According to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), low-lying areas, offshore islands and ‘chars’ [river islands] were inundated by storm surges 2-3 metres above normal tides, destroying homes, livelihoods, livestock and displacing thousands of families.

Many areas of coastal Patuakhali and Barguna districts disappeared under roughly 2.5 metres of tidal water. Some 80 percent of Barasal District was flooded.

Crops lost, damaged

More than 240,000 mostly thatched homes were damaged or destroyed, while about 121,400 hectares of crops were lost or damaged, the DMB reported on 26 May.

Other losses include about 60,000 livestock; the complete or partial destruction of nearly 850 educational institutions; 2,414km of roads; and 509km of flood embankments.

At a press conference on 26 May, Minister of Food and Disaster Management Muhammad Abdur Razzaque announced that the army, coast guards and the navy had been mobilised for relief operations. Thousands of volunteers of the Cyclone Preparedness Programme (CPP) of the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society have also been deployed.

Second cyclone this year

Aila is the second tropical cyclone to strike Bangladesh this year. On 17 April, Cyclone Bijli lashed the country’s southeastern coastal region, killing five people.

According to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), tropical cyclones occur at the rate of 1.3 a year in Bangladesh, resulting in numerous casualties and significant economic losses.

The last major cyclone to hit Bangladesh was Cyclone Sidr in November 2007, which left around 3,500 dead.

Tropical cyclones in 1970 and 1991 killed around 500,000 and 138,000 people, respectively. In recent years, efficient early warning systems and preparedness measures have significantly reduced the number of lives lost, say experts.

© IRIN. All rights reserved.

 

The dying rivers have spoken

NewAge, May 1, 2009

For Bangladesh, a country that would probably fare the worst in the face of climate change because of raised sea levels, such consequences of glacial retreats in the faraway Himalayas could be disastrous. As large swathes of Bangladesh’s coastal belt are already ravaged by cyclones, salinisation and rising sea-levels, scientists say the decrease in volume of year-round freshwater from Himalayan glaciers could bring disease, drought, and deluge of unseen proportions, writes Mahtab Haider*

THE implications of the study released by the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in the United States this month are ominous for Bangladesh. The study reveals that global warming is drying up some of the biggest river systems across the world faster than was previously thought, and more so for those rivers in highly populated areas, which are drying up at more alarming rates. ‘In the subtropics this [decrease] is devastating, but the continent affected most is Africa,’ said Kevin Trenberth of the atmospheric research centre. ‘The prospects generally are for rainfalls, when they do occur, to be heavier and with greater risk of flooding and with longer dry spells in between, so water management becomes much more difficult.’
   

According to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, the scientists examined recorded data and computer models of flow in 925 rivers, constituting about 73 per cent of the world’s supply of running water, from 1948 to 2004. ‘It found that climate change had had an impact on about a third of the major rivers. More than twice as many rivers experienced diminished flow as a result of climate change than those that saw a rise in water levels.’
   

According to the NCAR scientists, the Ganges system is among those showing some of the most significant downward trends in freshwater flow as a result of dams and increased population pressures upstream, but also because higher temperatures are causing higher rates of evaporation, with changing rainfall patterns failing to feed into the river system.
   

For Bangladesh, India, and the region as a whole, there is no doubt that reduced freshwater flows in the Ganges river system will prove devastating in the long run. The effects will be multifarious, effecting agriculture, nutrition, navigability of the rivers, and most of all allowing swathes of land along the coast to become unfit for habitation as rising seawaters advance further inwards.
   

Diminishing freshwater flows on the Ganges will likely debilitate predominantly agrarian economies along its banks and may eventually strip the region’s people of the major source of protein in their diets, as a result of a reduction in the quantity of micro-nutrients that debouch into the Bay of Bengal, originating in the Himalayas. Sundarban, on both sides of the border, are after all the richest fish nursery in all of South Asia, largely as a result of the ecology of the Ganges from its headwaters to its watershed.
   

What’s worse, diminishing freshwater flows across South Asian river systems including the Ganges and the Brahmaputra will be further reinforced, say scientists, as a result of shrinking glaciers. The Himalayas have the largest concentration of glaciers outside the polar caps. During the dry season, when water is in short supply, these glaciers feed eight of Asia’s greatest rivers: to the east, south and west – the Yangtze, Hwang Ho, Salween, Irrawady, Mekong,

Tsangpo/Brahmaputra/Jamuna, Indus, and the many tributaries of the Ganges including the Kosi, Gandaki and Karnali that debouch from the Nepali midhills. The glaciers of the Himalayas as a whole are referred to by scientists as the ‘water towers of Asia’, because they serve as storage that release water throughout the year into the rivers of Asia.
   

According to a report by the World Wildlife Fund, 67 per cent of the Himalayan glaciers are melting at a startling rate and ‘the major causal factor has been identified as climate change’. The Khumbu Glacier, from where Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary began their historic ascent of Mt Everest, has retreated more than five kilometres since they climbed the mountain in 1953. The 30km Gangotri Glacier in India, near the Badrinath pilgrimage centre, has been receding over the last three decades at more than three times the rate than it had during the previous two centuries. The Rika Samba Glacier in Nepal’s Dhaulagiri region is retreating at 10m per year. Such measurements alarm scientists, who were previously used to gauging glacial retreat in centimetres.
   

And this is not just happening in Nepal’s mountains. Across the Himalayas, from Tibet in the north to the Karakoram in the west, the glaciers are melting so fast that the WWF fears that a quarter of the ice floes could disappear by 2050. In the climate equilibrium that has evolved over millennia, the glaciers (because of their white colour) reflect back sunlight, keeping the high-altitude peaks within a certain temperature range. As the glaciers start melting and receding as a result of global warming, however, they reveal the darker rock underneath, which in turn absorbs more sunlight and intensifies the melting process. Meanwhile, greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere then reflect that heat back onto the earth’s surface, accelerating the process even further.
   

‘The melting glaciers represent a time-bomb that is ticking away even as we speak,’ cautions Pradeep Mool, a specialist on glaciers at Kathmandu’s International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development. ‘Glaciers melt to form high-altitude lakes, dammed with debris and moraine that characterises the landscape of the Himalayas. But as the water from glacial melt accumulates over the years, these dams which are structurally weak suddenly give way, resulting in what we call glacial lake outburst floods, or GLOFs.’
   

GLOFS, indeed, are the most obvious results of glacial melt. In 1964, one such GLOF destroyed entire stretches of a highway in China and washed 12 timber trucks more than 70km downstream. A GLOF at Nepal’s Dig Tsho glacier in 1985 destroyed a hydroelectric project near Namche Bazaar, as well as bridges, houses and farmlands worth. The total estimated damage was $4 million. ‘And it isn’t just water that crashes down into the valleys,’ says Mool, holding up a photograph from a 1991 outburst in Nepal that swept away entire villages. ‘You have rocks and other debris that rush downriver at enormous speed.’
   

Since 1964, Nepal alone has witnessed 13 catastrophic GLOF events. There are over 5000 glacial lakes between Bhutan, Pakistan, India, Nepal and Tibet/China, and scientists regard at least 90 of these lakes to be potentially dangerous. ‘The real problem,’ sighs Mool, ‘is that we don’t even know the extent of the problem, since countries such as India and Pakistan will not share the data and maps of their mountainous regions.’ As the glaciers melt and recede, more glacial lakes are expected and hence more incidence of GLOFS.
   

‘Contrary to popular perception, this isn’t Nepal’s problem or Pakistan’s problem, but a problem for the entire Subcontinent,’ urges Madan Lal Sreshtha. ‘The melt waters from these retreating glaciers mother the river systems of the Brahmaputra and the Ganga, so if these glaciers eventually disappear, the flow in the rivers will be drastically reduced and almost negligible during the non-monsoon months. Says Shrestha, ‘Glaciers accumulate snow during the South Asian monsoon and it is meltwater from these glaciers that feeds river systems that flow through India and Bangladesh during the dry season until April-May,’ he explains. ‘As the glaciers recede, not only will these rivers flood during the rainy season – with the water that is not frozen and held back by the glaciers – but in the lean seasons, there will also be less and less water in these rivers. Eventually, when the glaciers disappear, there will only be a trickle of water in these great rivers in the winter.’
   

The decrease in non-monsoon flows would affect the populated plains of South Asia in a thousand different ways. Winter agriculture would suffer, recharge of underground aquifers would be affected thus reducing groundwater reserves, and the use of water for urban and industrial purpose would also be affected, as would water transport, fisheries, wetlands, and water-dependent wildlife. Overall, we are looking at long-lasting impact that that has not even begun to be studied at a time when we are just awakening to the fact of receding glaciers.
   

For Bangladesh, a country that would probably fare the worst in the face of climate change because of raised sea levels, such consequences of glacial retreats in the faraway Himalayas could be disastrous. As large swathes of Bangladesh’s coastal belt are already ravaged by cyclones, salinisation and rising sea-levels, scientists say the decrease in volume of year-round freshwater from Himalayan glaciers could bring disease, drought, and deluge of unseen proportions.
   

A model developed in part by the Indian Centre for Ecology and Hydrology reveals that glacial melt will result in ‘an increase in river discharge at the beginning causing widespread flooding in the adjacent areas.’ But after a few decades, the model warns, this situation will reverse and water levels in these rivers will start declining to permanently decreased levels. In the upper Indus, the study shows initial increases of between 14 and 90 percent in flows over the first few decades, followed by flows decreasing between 30 and 90 percent over the following century.


When world leaders meet in December this year to hammer out a long term deal on how to tackle the spectre of climate change, they should be reminded that the fallout of global warming is no longer in the realm of academic projections. People in some of the poorest parts of the world have already started living these realities.
   

*mahtabhaider@gmail.com

Bangladesh Fears Rising Seas “Devastating”

AlertNet 30-April-09 Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

TROMSOE – Low-lying Bangladesh risks devastating impacts from rising world sea levels caused by climate change with risks that millions will be forced from their homes this century, Foreign Minister Dipu Moni said.

She told Reuters that rich nations would have to help the densely populated country of 150 million people, possibly by opening their borders to environmental refugees.

Bangladesh faces threats from cyclones from the Bay of Bengal and floods inland along the vast mouth of the Ganges River.

“Bangladesh is going to be one of the worst affected countries as it is a low-lying delta,” she said on the sidelines of a two-day conference on melting ice and the Arctic Council in Tromsoe, north Norway.

“As one of the most densely populated in the world, (climate change) is going to be unbearable almost for the country, for the people. It’s going to be devastating,” she said.

The government was working on a plan targeting better food security, social protection and health, disaster management, better infrastructure, research and a shift to greener technologies.

But there were limits to Bangladesh’s ability to cope with global warming stoked by emissions of greenhouse gases in other countries from factories, power plants and cars.

“It’s already a very densely populated country so moving people inland — how many can you do? So…the world will have to come together and decide how should we accommodate these people who will be environmental refugees,” she said.

“Our people are known to be very hard working…they are already working as migrant workers all over the world and contributing to many economies of the world. Maybe the world will have to think about taking some of these people and relocating them?” she said.

“This is not an official plan, but we have to be open in our thinking about how to accommodate these people. We are talking about huge numbers,” she said.

She added that the problem of climate refugees was also an issue for many other low-lying states and not the focus of government work. River deltas are hard to shore up against rising seas.

The U.N. Climate Panel projected in 2007 world sea levels would rise by between 18 and 59 cms (7-23 inches) this century, but omitted risks of an accelerating melt of Greenland or Antartcica.

The Panel listed Bangladesh among the most vulnerable countries to climate change. Millions of people live less than a metre above sea level. And from 1980 to 2000, 60 percent of 250,000 deaths worldwide from cyclones occurred in Bangladesh.

Moni said that rising seas and storms would bring more salinity to farmland, affecting crops and changing the types of fish able to survive.

“Climate change will give rise to more flooding, more cyclones, not just the frequency but the severity will be more. Bangladesh is already prone to natural calamities,” she said.

She said that Bangladesh had a fund for adaptating to climate change worth $45 million and an international donor trust fund totalling $100 million.

Saline-tolerant variety can help boost rice production

Says minister

The Daily Star, April 23, 2009. Dhaka

Cultivation of BR-47, a saline-tolerant rice variety, in the southern coastal region could bring about significant changes in rice production, Food and Disaster Management Minister Dr Abdur Razzaque said yesterday.

“There are around 2.8 million hectares of agricultural land in the coastal districts. If high yielding varieties like BR-47 are developed, there could be a dramatic change in rice production,” he said.

The minister was speaking as the chief guest at the closing ceremony of a two-day seminar titled ‘Stress Tolerance Rice for Poor Farmers in Africa and South Asia (STRASA)’, at the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) in Gazipur.

Farmers have already started cultivating the BR-47 variety in limited scale, which has shown huge success, he said at the seminar organised by BRRI.

“You cannot increase the yield of the existing varieties to a great extent. Therefore, development of stress-tolerant varieties, which can tolerate drought or submergence, is important,” said the minister.

The developed countries need to invest more in advance agriculture research, he noted.

BRRI is on the way to develop submergence-tolerant and drought-tolerant varieties and will be able to release those in near future, said BRRI Director General Dr Firoze Shah Sikder.

Chairing the closing session, Bangladesh Agriculture University Vice Chancellor Dr Abdus Sattar Mondal said it is necessary to seriously look into the nutritional standards and livelihoods.

Referring to the recent fall of rice prices, Mondal said the government must provide incentives to farmers to maintain better rice production.

International Rice Research Institute Program Leader Dr David Mackill, Liaison Scientist for Bangladesh Dr MA Hamid Miah and STRASA South Asian Regional Project Coordinator Dr Uma Shankar Singh also spoke.

Water Levels Dropping in Some Major Rivers as Global Climate Changes

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), April 21, 2009

BOULDER—Rivers in some of the world’s most populous regions are losing water, according to a new comprehensive study of global stream flow. The study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), suggests that in many cases the reduced flows are associated with climate change. The process could potentially threaten future supplies of food and water.

The results will be published May 15 in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor.

The scientists, who examined stream flow from 1948 to 2004, found significant changes in about one-third of the world’s largest rivers. Of those, rivers with decreased flow outnumbered those with increased flow by a ratio of about 2.5 to 1.

This map shows the change in runoff inferred from streamflow records worldwide between 1948 and 2004, with bluish colors indicating more streamflow and reddish colors less. In many heavily populated regions in the tropics and midlatitudes, rivers are discharging reduced amounts into the oceans. In parts of the United States and Europe, however, there is an upward trend in runoff. The white land areas indicate inland-draining basins or regions for which there are insufficient data to determine the runoff trends. (Graphic courtesy Journal of Climate, modified by UCAR.)

Several of the rivers channeling less water serve large populations, including the Yellow River in northern China, the Ganges in India, the Niger in West Africa, and the Colorado in the southwestern United States. In contrast, the scientists reported greater stream flow over sparsely populated areas near the Arctic Ocean, where snow and ice are rapidly melting.

“Reduced runoff is increasing the pressure on freshwater resources in much of the world, especially with more demand for water as population increases,” says NCAR scientist Aiguo Dai, the lead author. “Freshwater being a vital resource, the downward trends are a great concern.”

Many factors can affect river discharge, including dams and the diversion of water for agriculture and industry. The researchers found, however, that the reduced flows in many cases appear to be related to global climate change, which is altering precipitation patterns and increasing the rate of evaporation. The results are consistent with previous research by Dai and others showing widespread drying and increased drought over many land areas.

The study raises wider ecological and climate concerns. Discharge from the world’s great rivers results in deposits of dissolved nutrients and minerals into the oceans. The freshwater flow also affects global ocean circulation patterns, which are driven by changes in salinity and temperature and which play a vital role in regulating the world’s climate. Although the recent changes in the freshwater discharge are relatively small and may only have impacts around major river mouths, Dai said the freshwater balance in the global oceans needs to be monitored for any long-term changes.

Conflicting studies

Scientists have been uncertain about the impacts of global warming on the world’s major rivers. Studies with computer models show that many of the rivers outside the Arctic could lose water because of decreased precipitation in the mid- and lower latitudes and an increase in evaporation caused by higher temperatures. Earlier, less comprehensive analyses of major rivers had indicated, however, that global stream flow was increasing.

Dai and his co-authors analyzed the flows of 925 of the planet’s largest rivers, combining actual measurements with computer-based stream flow models to fill in data gaps. The rivers in the study drain water from every major landmass except Antarctica and Greenland and account for 73 percent of the world’s total stream flow.

Overall, the study found that, from 1948 to 2004, annual freshwater discharge into the Pacific Ocean fell by about 6 percent, or 526 cubic kilometers–approximately the same volume of water that flows out of the Mississippi River each year. The annual flow into the Indian Ocean dropped by about 3 percent, or 140 cubic kilometers. In contrast, annual river discharge into the Arctic Ocean rose about 10 percent, or 460 cubic kilometers.

In the United States, the Columbia River’s flow declined by about 14 percent during the 1948-2004 study period, largely because of reduced precipitation and higher water usage in the West. The Mississippi River, however, has increased by 22 percent over the same period because of greater precipitation across the Midwest since 1948.

The impacts of melting

Some rivers, such as the Brahmaputra in South Asia and the Yangtze in China, have shown stable or increasing flows. But they could lose volume in future decades with the gradual disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers feeding them, the authors warned.

“As climate change inevitably continues in coming decades, we are likely to see greater impacts on many rivers and water resources that society has come to rely on,” says NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, a co-author of the study.

World’s first ‘climate refugees’

AlJazeera, April 21, 2009

Environmentalists predict that climate change will affect more than 375 million people every year by 2015, due to natural disasters and rising sea levels. 

Thousands of people in Bangladesh are thought to be the world’s first “climate refugees” due to severe flooding. 

Nicholas Haque reports from Kutubdia island in southern Bangladesh.

Monsoon impact of climate change could devastate agriculture

Editorial, NewAge, March 3, 2009

A RECENT study finding that the South Asian monsoon may be delayed by five to 15 days in the next hundred years due to climate change has predicted new impacts on South Asia, including Bangladesh. As reported in New Age on Monday this change in the pattern of the monsoon would have effects on not just livelihoods and public health but also agriculture, which remains crucial and serves as a lifeline for the domestic economy.
   

Accounting for the employment of almost half the labour force, contributing about a fifth of the national GDP and producing 90 per cent of the country’s yearly demand for cereals, subsistence agriculture, particularly small and marginal farmers, quite undoubtedly provide the base for Bangladesh’s rural economy and sustain the millions. But as the study finds, climate change impacts could lead to changes in weather patterns, delaying monsoon and higher rainfall, obviously leading to floods, it would spell disaster for the aman season.
   

The aman season in particular is important because it requires little input in terms of irrigation, coinciding with the monsoons. But this crop is also vulnerable to flooding and as has been noted in the previous years in Bangladesh, farmers have complained that it is increasingly becoming routine for them to lose aman paddy to floods than being able to get some harvest out of it. The proceeds from sales of aman crops are generally used as part of the capital farmers need for the input-dependent boro season that follows and produces almost 60 per cent of the country’s yearly production of cereals.
   

There is little doubt that with more change in weather patterns, farmers in the countryside would require climate proofing and resources to adapt to this new scenario. Although the government has prepared a climate change adaptation strategy, that was highly criticised by different organisations and groups of citizens. The climate change trust fund which the military-controlled interim government of Fakhruddin Ahmed agreed to hand over to the World Bank for management and disbursement also came under severe criticism since it was the position of the least developed countries and small economies vulnerable to climate change that the management of the funds should be done by a committee comprising all stakeholders including the government, minorities, women, non-governmental organisations and if needed multilateral and foreign lending agencies.
   

Not only in the case of Bangladesh, the global response to provide poor countries with funds to cope with the adverse impacts of climate change has been rather poor and the money pledged thus far is but a fraction of even the most conservative estimates. Besides the overall strategy for climate change adaptation, the government direly needs to figure out how it intends to handle climate change and ensure the country’s food security when agriculture in general and certain crops in particular are threatened.