Bangladesh is a land of water. The briny rivers flow down from the Himalayas, emptying into a filigree maze of ponds, wetlands and tributaries before emptying into the stormy, black Bay of Bengal.
Now the greatest threat is water, in its many terrible incarnations: drought, deluge, cyclones, salt water. All are exacerbated to varying degrees by climate change, and all are forcing millions of people to do whatever they can to cope.
This matters to the rest of the world, because what the 170 million people of this densely populated, low-lying delta nation face today, many of us will face tomorrow.
The people of Bangladesh rush to harvest rice as soon as they hear that it is going to rain upstream. They build floating beds of water hyacinths to grow vegetables out of the reach of flooding. Where shrimp farms have made the soil too saline to grow crops, they grow okra and tomatoes not in soil, but in compost, filled in plastic boxes that once held shrimp. Where the land itself washes away, people have to move to other towns and cities. And where they even run out of drinking water, they learn to drink every drop of rain.
Saber Hossain Chowdhury, a legislator from a ruling party and the prime minister’s climate envoy, compared his country’s efforts to plugging a leaking barrel. “It’s like having a drum that has seven leaks, and you have two hands,” he said. “What are you doing? It’s not easy.”
Bangladesh has managed to save lives during cyclones and floods. But there are many other challenges that need to be tackled 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 rural migrants, and even maintaining good relations with neighboring countries to 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 countries have not provided the resources developing countries need to adapt to the dangers they already face. It is a theme of this week’s climate summit in Paris.
Of Bangladesh’s 64 districts, half are considered vulnerable to climate change.
An early warning system
In mid-April, Rakibul Alam, an agricultural extension officer in the lowlands of the north, received a warning from his boss in the nearest town, Sunamganj, who had himself been warned by his superiors in the capital, Dhaka.
Mr Alam was told that heavy rains could fall in northeastern India within a few weeks, causing floods to spill across the border and drown the fields in his area just as the rice was ripening .
He knew he had to convince local farmers to get as much rice from the fields as quickly as possible. And that meant helping them overcome a psychological hurdle. Even in an area prone to flash flooding, farmers want to squeeze as much rice as possible from their small plots of land. “They want to wait until the grain is 100 percent matured to get the best yield,” Alam said.
This year, he knew, waiting could be catastrophic.
Mr. Alam turned to his local networks. Calls and texts went out to leaders of farmers’ associations. Volunteers went from village to village with megaphones. Imams used their mosque loudspeakers. The message was clear: flash floods could be on the way, harvest the rice that is almost ready, don’t wait.
To Mr. Alam’s relief, farmers took the warning to heart. They worked non-stop, even during the Eid al-Fitr holidays. By April 25, almost all fields had been cleared.
Fortunately, this time the rain was not heavy and there were no flash floods, but the harvest was protected.
It was a dry run, so to speak, for which could happen more often as climate change intensifies rains and increases the risk of flash flooding in these lowlands. It was also an extension of the early warning system used to keep people out of harm’s way when a cyclone approaches the coast. This time it was used to save a crop.
The government, in turn, has an ambitious national adaptation plan with expensive projects, such as dredging silt rivers and building dykes to hold back the sea.
But much of that has yet to materialize, and critics say major infrastructure jobs are full of potential for mismanagement and bribery. “Climate vulnerability is there,” said Zakir Hossain Khan, who analyzes climate finance for a local nonprofit called Change Initiative. “Also vulnerability to corruption.”
Floating gardens and tiger tracks
What do you do when the rivers swell and your crops drown?
If you are Shakti Kirtanya, you grow your crops on top of the water. When the water rises, so do they. They float and bob. “When you see the harvest, it will fill your heart with joy,” he said.
Mr. Kirtanya learned this farming technique from his father, who learned it from his own. It has been practiced for 200 years in its low-lying district, Gopalganj, where the land is usually flooded for half of the year.
With climate change spreading flood risk to many other areas, Gopalganj floating gardens are expanding. For the past five years, the government has supported floating gardens in 24 of the country’s 64 districts.
Mr. Kirtanya uses what he has. He cuts the stems of water hyacinths in the lake near his house, lets the pile stew in the sun and forms long, wide seedbeds on top of the water. In summer he sows watermelon and amaranth, in winter cabbage and cauliflower. The garden is a source of income and a source for his family of fresh produce grown without chemicals.
“Whether it rains late or early, it doesn’t affect it,” said Mr. Kirtanya. “It doesn’t hurt in the heat, either.”
There is one imminent danger. The sea water comes further inland. In part, it’s due to sea level rise, which causes tides to rise. This is partly because rivers are dammed upstream and not enough fresh water flows downstream. This is partly because too much groundwater is being drawn up.
Mr. Kirtanya saw a glimpse of a salty future last year. Leaves turned red. Plants became brittle.
That saline future is already present in the 3,860 square kilometer mangrove forest, the Sundarbans, on the edge of the Bay of Bengal.
The forest is the country’s main defense against storm surges. The roots of the sundari, the species of mangrove after which the forest is named, stick out of the mud like the fingers of the dead. Tigers leave their prints in the ground.
Today the almost unthinkable happens. The water becomes too salty for the sundari. They are dying. Other mangrove species are taking over. The landscape changes. Probably forever.
“I don’t think the sundari will come back unless the salinity decreases,” said Nazrul Islam, the son of a forest ranger who grew up in the area and now organizes river trips in the forest. “And I don’t see the possibility of the salinity decreasing.”
Capture the rain
Sheela Biswas faces the salinity crisis every day. Salt has infiltrated canals and ponds on which her village depends to drink and wash. An estimated 30 million people living along the coast are affected to varying degrees by saltwater intrusion. The area where Mrs. Biswas lives is one of the hardest hit areas.
It wasn’t like that when she came as a bride 30 years ago. Back then, most people ate rice that they grew on their land. They drank water that they collected in their pond.
Then came “white gold,” shrimp. Shrimp farms proliferated. People let in salt water through a channel of the river, so salt water also spread. Mrs. Biswas’s pond became too salty to drink.
First she rented a cart to buy water. Then she turned to a neighbor who built an underground tank to collect rainwater. She invented her own rainwater harvesting system using what she had at home, shaking plastic pipes to divert rainwater from her zinc roof through a fishing net to clay pots. She still had to bathe in her salty pond, which caused a rash, a common complaint in the area. Doctors say rates of hypertension are also high; they suspect that their patients inadvertently ingest too much salt.
The latest solution to Ms. Biswas’s problem came in the form of a bright pink 2,000 liter plastic water tank, the equivalent of about 530 gallons, with a filter on top. It stands in her courtyard and collects monsoon rains, one of nearly 4,000 such tanks distributed over the past three years by a development organization, BRAC, that helps the poor.
Shrimp are no longer white gold. Intensive shrimp farming has brought new risks, including diseases that depress profits. Some of her neighbors have started closing their shrimp ponds, filling them with sand and waiting for the rain to wash away the salt underneath.
That’s rare. Most people here have very little land, and they can’t afford to leave it unused so it can recover. They’re stuck. “They can’t rely on shrimp and they can’t change,” Ms Biswas said.
Even if they could, sea level rise, combined with subsidence for other reasons, threatens to increase the threat of salt in the water. If the land is sinking, even a small rise in sea level is very dangerous. Dikes sometimes collapse during tidal waves, which become increasingly stronger.
Like Mrs. Biswas, the people of the southwest coast have tried everything to find drinking water.
A few entrepreneurs sell water that they desalinate at home using small reverse osmosis plants, but which ends up dumping salty mud into nearby ponds. Some people move to the busy port town of Mongla, but fresh water is also scarce there.
Further south, where the soil is too salty to plant crops, women have started growing vegetables in pots filled with compost and manure. Or they’ve turned empty rice bags into planters, even plastic boxes that once carried shrimp to market.
Their feeble efforts to secure the most basic human needs, food and water, are a glimpse into the epic struggles of hundreds of millions of people who struggle every day to cope with climate risks.
Money for adaptation, $29 billion for all developing countries by 2020, is a small fraction of what is needed: at least $160 billion a year, according to United Nations estimates. This explains the anger of leaders of developing countries in international climate politics.
Unless global emissions are reduced quickly and drastically, there is little Bangladesh can do to stay above the surface, lawmaker Chowdhury said. “No matter what we do, it won’t be enough,” he said.
Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Bangladesh.
