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Bangladesh Confronts Climate Change
Keeping Our Heads above Water
By Manoj Roy, Joseph Hanlon, David Hulme Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2016 Manoj Roy, Joseph Hanlon and David Hulme
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-635-1
CHAPTER 1
ACTORS, NOT VICTIMS
Sumi is busy raising the floor of her small but comfortable house in Rupshaghat, Khulna, to make sure that her bed and TV set are not damaged when the area floods during the next monsoon. Khondaker Kabir is designing houses that local carpenters can build and also better withstand the stronger cyclones. Ainun Nishat was vice chancellor of BRAC University and led the Bangladesh negotiators at United Nations climate change conferences where a mixed government and civil society team won concessions from the developed world on payments for loss and damage caused by climate change. All three are Bangladeshis on the front line responding to climate change. They are not 'victims', but people who know climate change is real and that Bangladesh must adapt. And Bangladeshis have centuries of experience in adapting to environmental challenges.
Bangladesh is the eighth most populous country in the world but only slightly larger than England and the same size as the US state of Illinois. It is the most densely populated country in the world – with double the population density of Taiwan and triple that of the Netherlands and Rwanda. It has so many people because it lies on a rich delta and feeds itself. But that richness comes at a price. One of the largest deltas in the world, it is mainly flat and low lying. Water from the Himalayas and monsoon rains pours down the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, causing annual flooding. Some floods are benign and bring fertility, but others are hugely destructive and the rivers shift their courses eroding farmland and creating new islands. Cyclones coming north, up the Bay of Bengal, can cause massive damage. And the environment itself is hugely variable, from year to year and place to place. Bangladesh is only 600 km wide, but average annual rainfall ranges from 1.5 m in the west to 5 m in the east.
Indeed, Bangladesh has been and is shaped by geographic, environmental and political factors often entirely beyond its borders. Climate change is the newest of these factors. But centuries of coping, adapting and shaping the land and society have given Bangladeshis a strong understanding of what climate change will bring. Knowing how devastating unchecked climate change will be has propelled Bangladeshi academics and politicians into leading roles in international negotiations. National scientists and engineers, as well as community groups building on historic knowledge, are already working to protect Bangladesh against the vagaries of the existing climate as well as the problems that will be created by future climate change.
Thus Bangladeshis have centuries of adaptation experience, including ancient systems of dykes, siting hamlets on small hills and building houses on raised earthen plinths. The 45 years since independence have seen many local innovations including improved varieties of rice which have changed the entire cropping pattern. These are Bangladeshi innovations. Lack of understanding of local systems means advice and projects from British colonizers, the World Bank, the United States and the Netherlands have often been problematic.
The biggest success has been cyclone protection, which is little recognized outside Bangladesh because it is a national innovation and not one driven by donor agencies. There have been three 'super cyclones' in the past 50 years with wind speeds over 222 km/h: Bhola (1970), which left between 200, 000 and 500,000 dead; Gorky (1991), which left 138,000 dead; and Sidr (2007), which left 3,363 dead. This huge drop in fatalities is due to national actions – better early warning, cyclone shelters and higher coastal dykes. The Bangladesh Meteorological Department follows all tropical depressions closely and issues accurate and detailed cyclone warnings. The Cyclone Preparedness Programme has 50,000 volunteers who use megaphones and house-to-house contact to give cyclone warnings. There are now more than three thousand and seven hundred cyclone shelters – huge concrete structures often used as schools that are built on pillars at first-floor level, so wind and water can pass under and around them. They are stocked with food and water and serve entire communities. Finally coastal embankments are being raised, which at least breaks the violence of the storm surge.
'Bangladesh is ranked as one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world' according to the 2014 Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Although it does not create any new problems for Bangladesh, climate change will accentuate the present problems. More variable and more severe weather makes all the adaptation challenges much more serious. More droughts, more floods, more erosion, more severe cyclones and more salt penetration require better rice varieties, higher embankments, stronger houses built on higher platforms and more cyclone shelters. Urban migration means adapting the country's burgeoning cities to deal with a worsening environment, which will be a major challenge.
But the people of Bangladesh are not simply victims – climate change refugees – as the Western media proclaims. Bangladeshis are taking a lead, both nationally and internationally, in responding to climate change, and in this book we talk to them. As Prof. Nishat told us, 'Bangladesh is God's laboratory on natural disaster, so we know how to deal with most of this.' We hear from people living in informal settlements in cities trying to keep dry, and from negotiators trying to convince the already industrialized nations – and the rapidly growing ones as well – that they must reduce their carbon emissions.
Scientific research is central to this story, from the researchers modelling climate change to those developing the new rice varieties. They are working with local people, for example, to use traditional methods to raise the land level to stay ahead of sea level rise. If climate change is checked, Bangladesh can adapt, and keep its head above water. But who pays?
And adaptation can only go so far. Embankments can be raised to cope with sea level rise and pumps can be installed to deal with extreme rainfall, but there are limits. Unchecked climate change will drown parts of Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which is not the result of Bangladeshi actions. Yet again, the people must respond to outside forces. Bangladeshis refuse to be victims – they will not sit passive and helpless in the face of a possible catastrophe. Instead negotiators fighting to curb rich countries' emissions, scientists producing better adapted rice and ordinary people raising their land are combating and adapting to climate change. They are on the front line of climate change and this book is their story.
Shaped by Geography and Politics
Bangladesh was carved first from colonial India and then from Pakistan, which explains its unusual borders. Bangladesh is surrounded on three sides by India, but the northernmost point of the country is just 25 km from Nepal and 65 km from Bhutan. (Indeed, at its nearest point, China is only 100 km north of Bangladesh.) In the southeast Bangladesh has a 271 km border with Myanmar (Burma). The south faces the Bay of Bengal.
Three vast rivers – Brahmaputra, Ganges and Meghna – join together in Bangladesh and make the third largest river in the world (by flow volume, after the Amazon and Congo rivers). All three receive most of their water from monsoon rain, and normally 90 per cent of the water comes from outside Bangladesh:
• The Brahmaputra is 3,000 km long and provides 56 per cent of the total water. It flows from the northeast and receives 27 per cent of its water from snow and melting glaciers in the Himalaya mountains above 2,000 m in northeast India and China. Because of snow and glacier melt, it starts to rise early, in March, and reaches its peak levels in July and August.
• The Ganges is 2,600 km long and provides 25 per cent of the total water. It flows from the northwest and receives 10 per cent of its water from snow and melting glaciers in the Himalaya mountains above 2,000 m in northern India and Nepal. This river starts to rise in May and peaks in August and September, later than the Brahmaputra.
• The Meghna is 264 km long and provides 19 per cent of the total water. The wettest place in the world is in the state of Meghalaya, India, just 20 km north of the Bangladesh border, and it receives nearly 12 m of rain per year, and twice that in exceptional years, which flows in the Meghna. High water is July through September.
Floods are a natural part of the ecology of Bangladesh, and most floods are not 'disasters'. However three rivers with different catchment areas, each with its own rain and snowfall patterns, combined with Bangladesh's own variable rainfall, means every flood is different. Bangla has two words for floods, barsha for the normal beneficial floods which renew the land and bonna for the less frequent but more destructive floods that happen about once a decade.
Barsha floods typically inundate 20 per cent of the country's land for three to five months. But peak levels last only for a week or two during the monsoon; people move to higher ground and children see it as a bit of a party. One of the authors remembers as a child using a banana tree trunk as a makeshift boat and paddling around his farm – the flood season was 'fun'.
The worst flood in a century was in 1998 when 68 per cent of the country was flooded, including 70 per cent of the capital, Dhaka; and in many areas flooding lasted for two months. In that year, rainfall was unusually heavy and all three rivers hit their peaks at the same time, which coincided with a spring high tide that blocked water from flowing into the sea. Yet the 1998 flood came only four years after the driest year, 1994, when a mere 0.2 per cent of Bangladesh was flooded. There are also regional differences, with most floods affecting just part of the country. Figure 1.1 shows the percentage of Bangladesh that has been flooded each year from 1960, and demonstrates the extreme variation.
From the south come cyclones. Typically two to seven cyclones form in the Bay of Bengal each year, in the period just before and just after the monsoon. Of these, most do not reach land or make landfall in India or Myanmar, but, on average, one cyclone each year reaches land in Bangladesh and there is a severe cyclone every two to four years.
Bangladesh as 'Basket Case'
Just as there has been a constant struggle to deal with storms and floods coming from the outside, so there has been a battle against occupiers and foreign powers. We will only give the briefest summary of Bangladesh's history here as it relates to its environment, and point readers to David Lewis's excellent Bangladesh: Politics, Economy and Civil Society for more detail.
Written records go back to the third century BC and there have been various occupiers and periods of local control. Bengali (or Bangla) is the language of Bangladesh and in the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and Assam. Until 1947 this was seen as a unified area and from the thirteenth century there were three main religions, Shia Islam, Sunni Islam and Hinduism. Despite substantial local resistance, the Mughal Empire gained control over Bengal at the end of the sixteenth century, and the region developed and prospered. Mughal power declined from 1707 and the British East India Company grew in power. But there was resistance to the company rule and in 1756 the British were defeated in Calcutta (now Kolkata). The city was recaptured in 1757 and in 1765 formal British government rule commenced. Sporadic resistance continued throughout India and British colonialism finally ended in 1947. India was partitioned, with two largely Muslim areas defined as a new country: Pakistan. Millions of Muslims fled to Pakistan and Hindus fled to India. But what is now Bangladesh retained a large Hindu minority. The largely Muslim country was split into two parts, East and West Pakistan, separated by 1,600 km. This was an unprecedented way to create a country and never worked. The Bengali East was effectively ruled by the Urdu-speaking West, which proved unacceptable and led to the growth of a new nationalist Bangla-speaking movement.
Meanwhile, the cold war between the capitalist United States (US) and socialist Soviet Union (USSR) began to play a role. In 1958 Gen. Ayub Khanstaged a coup and established a military government in Pakistan that continued under Gen. Yahya Khan in 1969. With India aligned to the USSR, Pakistan sided with the US and China in the cold war. This led to substantial US and World Bank support for the Ayub Khan government. In 1970 the Bangladeshi Awami League won a majority in the Pakistan parliament but was blocked by the military from taking office. A few weeks later, on 12 November 1970, a cyclone and 5 m high storm surge killed between 200,000 and 500,000 people in the Chittagong area. The humanitarian relief was badly managed. The Pakistan government was blamed for the lack of preparation and a slow response, which intensified the pressure for Bangladesh's independence.
Operation Searchlight was organized at the highest level of the Pakistani military and launched unexpectedly on 25 March 1971. West Pakistani soldiers in East Pakistan began a systematic massacre of civilians who were believed to be promoting independence. Hindus and intellectuals were particular targets; tanks shelled the Dhaka University campus and students were machine-gunned as they fled. An official of the US consulate in Dhaka estimated at the time that at least 500 students were killed in the first two days. Bangladeshi independence was declared on 26 March, but West Pakistan fought for a further nine months trying to retain control.
The US strongly backed its cold war allies in West Pakistan. Two weeks into the slaughter, Archer Blood, the US Consul General in Dhaka, and most of the consulate staff sent a telegram to Washington protesting against continued US support for West Pakistan and its use of US weapons to massacre innocent civilians. But Blood did not know that Ayub Khan was using his links with China to work with President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to set up their historic meetings in China. The US backed West Pakistan throughout the war despite the atrocities it perpetrated.
As the war continued, India backed Bangladesh and the USSR backed India and Bangladesh; both the US and USSR sent warships to the Bay of Bengal. The nine-month war ended with the surrender of Pakistan's military to the Bangladesh-India Allied Forces on 16 December 1971. Between one and three million Bangladeshis had been killed, including a significant portion of the educated elite, who had been targeted by Pakistan. Even now, 45 years later, it is notable that many of the key intellectuals working on climate change who were students at the time of the massacre have only survived because they were abroad at the time working on their PhDs .
Not surprisingly, the new nation and the US were hostile to each other. Just before independence, a US under secretary of state said Bangladesh would be 'an international basket case', to which Kissinger, pointing to his unwillingness to support the new country, replied, 'but not necessarily our basket case'. There was a military coup in Bangladesh in 1975, and General Ziaur Rahman (known as Zia) eventually gained power. A former member of the Pakistani army who had been decorated for bravery in the 1965 Pakistaniwar against India and played a major role in Bangladesh's war of independence, Zia was pro-Western and won US support.
This sort of politics may seem very far from climate change and ecology, but just as a devastating cyclone played a key role in pushing forward independence, so the Mughals, British and cold war US shaped the dykes and canals that do and will play an important part in the response to climate change.
Bangladesh as a Development Success Story
Since independence Bangladesh has transformed dramatically, especially in comparison to neighbour India and former ruler Pakistan. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen in their book An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions point out that 'over the last two decades India has expanded its lead over Bangladesh in terms of average income (it is now about twice as rich in income per capita as Bangladesh), and yet in terms of many typical indicators of living standards (other than income per head), Bangladesh not only does better than India, but also has a considerable lead over it (just as India had, two decades ago, a substantial lead over Bangladesh in the same indicators).'
They go on to argue that 'there is much evidence to suggest that Bangladesh's rapid progress in living standards has been greatly helped by the agency of women, and particularly the fact that girls have been rapidly educated and women have been widely involved – much more than in India – in the expansion of basic education, health care, family planning and other public services as well as being a bigger part of the industrial labour force.' Table 1.1 gives comparisons of Bangladesh with neighbours India and Myanmar and with Pakistan, and shows it is doing well on social indicators despite its lower income.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bangladesh Confronts Climate Change by Manoj Roy, Joseph Hanlon, David Hulme. Copyright © 2016 Manoj Roy, Joseph Hanlon and David Hulme. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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