Climate change: alternative farming method stressed to cope with situation

The Daily Star, June 15, 2008. Dhaka, Bangladesh Renowned environmentalist Dr A Atiq Rahman yesterday urged experts to put their heads together to find alternative methods of cultivation and new varieties of crops adapting to global climate change.  He said it has become necessary to do so for ensuring food and occupational security for the people, especially of the southern part of the country. “With the sea level rising and underground water level declining, salinity is going to be a major problem. Taking notice of it at this very moment, we need to find alternatives because farmers are not being able to grow traditional crops anymore,” Dr Atiq said during a workshop for journalists yesterday. Although, Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) has invented a new variety of paddy, which is currently at the testing phase right now and may grow in saline environment, it has not been proven to be high yielding, he said. The Institute of Media and Communication Studies organised the workshop titled ‘Global Warming and Food Security in Coastal Areas of Bangladesh’ in Chhayanat Sankskritik Bhaban in Dhanmondi of the capital, as a part of a series of workshops on climate change. Saying that rising sea level, changes in temperature, rainfall, hydrological patterns and salinity, also land degradation and climate extremes like frequent floods and cyclones, will result in loss of agricultural productivity and crop yields, Dr Atiq stressed the need for integrating the issue of climate change in both sectoral and national development policies and programmes. While presenting the keynote, Dr Atiq, executive director of Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies also chairman of Climate Action Network South Asia, touched upon various aspects of climate change including its causes like greenhouse gas emission and global warming, rising sea level, rapid melting of icecaps, and changes in flood and drought regimes. “It is estimated that the sea level will rise 1 metre by no later than 2050, causing one fourth to one fifth of the country to go under water, displacing 13 percent of the population,” Dr Atiq said. From now on climate extremes like cyclones and floods are likely to occur with increasing frequency and ferocity due to the global climate change, he added. “Back to back flooding in one season and super cyclones like Sidr and Nargis in the same region within a short span of time were not happening before,” he said. For their geographical locations, countries like Bangladesh are likely to be the most affected by the global climate change, and developed nations which are more responsible for such changes, should take responsibilities to protect the countries bearing the brunt, Dr Atiq noted. “The flood regime will change inundating more areas, and drought will cover more areas of the country’s western part,” he said. In addition to increased salinity, waterlogging will also become a major problem contributing to loss of crop diversity and agriculture productivity, resulting in displacement of people from their homes and occupations. “All of these together will cause food insecurity, malnutrition, hunger and poverty,” Dr Atiq warned, putting out a call for a multiple but combined and accelerated efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change, and to help the population adapt to it.

 

The Gathering Storm

What Happens When Global Warming Turns Millions of Destitute Bangladeshi Into Environmental Refugees?

By George Black, On Earth, Summer 2008

By the end of the first day, it’s already become an ingrained reflex: brace for impact as yet another suicidal rickshaw, luridly painted with pictures of birds, animals, and Bollywood stars, swerves suddenly into our path. Our driver bangs on the horn, shimmies to the right, avoids an onrushing bus by a matter of inches, then calmly resumes his navigation of the demented streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh. I relax my death grip on the dashboard and exhale. Mostafizur Rahman Jewel, our translator, raises an eyebrow in amusement.

“No problem,” I say, feigning nonchalance. “Piece of cake.”

“Piece of cake?”

“It’s slang. Something really easy, no sweat. Like not killing that rickshaw-wallah. How do you say that in Bangla?”

“Panir moto shohoj,” he answers. “Easy like water.”

Easy like water. This is ironic, to say the least, because water, from the rivers, from the ocean, from the ground, is this country’s existential curse. Bangladesh and its 150 million people — the world’s seventh-largest population, compressed into an area the size of Iowa — have somehow contrived to have too much water, too little water, and more and more water of the wrong kind.

The long-range apocalypse facing the country is global warming and the accelerating sea-level rise that will accompany it. Think of the computer-generated image midway through Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which shows an inexorable blue wave engulfing a great swath of coastal Bangladesh. But while the Four Horsemen gather their forces, the daily short-term menace is the steady northward creep of salt from the Bay of Bengal. Today the land is saturated with people; little by little it is also becoming saturated with salt.

It all begins with topography. In his novel The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh, who grew up in Bangladesh, recounts the Hindu legend of how the Ganges Delta was formed. The goddess Ganga, from whom the river takes its name, descended from the heavens with such force that she would have split the earth apart had Lord Shiva not tamed her torrent by weaving it into the ash-covered strands of his hair. But then his braids unraveled and the river divided into thousands of channels. Now consider the map of Bangladesh, where three formidable rivers — the Brahmaputra, the Meghna, and the Ganges (known, once it crosses the Indian border, as the Padma) — converge to form a vast, tangled delta that I will spend a week exploring with the photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, half on water and half on land. There is no other landscape like it on the planet.

Bangladesh’s problem, like Lord Shiva’s hair, has many strands. All three of its great rivers rise in the Himalayas, from which they carry a huge load of sediment, made worse in recent years by the deforestation of the Himalayan foothills. Because Bangladesh is as flat as a pool table, most of it no more than a few feet above sea level, the flow of its rivers is sluggish. Riverbeds clog with silt and water levels rise; shorelines erode, swallowing up farmland; islands of sand and mud form, disperse, reform elsewhere. From May to November, the monsoons blanket the country with torrential rain, pushing the rivers over their banks, driving people from their homes, drowning them. Some years Bangladesh is lucky and only a third of its territory is flooded. Sometimes it’s half; sometimes it’s two-thirds or more.

Go to On Earth website to read the rest of the story.