"Bangladesh: At the mercy of climate change"

From: independent.co.uk

The Sundarbans nature reserve in Bangladesh's south-west is one of the last untouched places on Earth - and home to the largest population of tigers left in the wild. But the trees in the Sundarbans have suddenly started dying. And not just that: they have started dying in a way nobody has seen before, from the top down.

Nobody is sure what the cause is, but the country's leading scientists think the trees are dying because, in recent years, the water has turned from fresh to salty. The Sundarbans is a massive mangrove swamp, and the sea has begun encroaching. What we are seeing may be one of the first casualties of rising sea levels caused by global warming. "Nobody can say for sure whether it is climate change because there haven't been proper in-depth studies," says Professor Ainun Nishat, one of the country's leading environmentalists, and one of those involved in the UN's recent climate change report. "But this is the sort of effect rising sea levels will have on Bangladesh. We are fighting climate change on the front line. But the battle has to be integrated across all countries."

Then there were the deaths of thousands of fishermen off Bangladesh last summer. The Bay of Bengal was unusually rough. Usually, the authorities only issue a storm warning to fishermen to stay at home once or twice a year. Last year, four warnings were issued in the space of two months. Every warning meant the fishermen lost valuable days at sea. When the last warning came, they could not afford to stay ashore and went to sea anyway. Officially 1,700 drowned, but many Bangladeshis believe the real number may be closer to 10,000.

"Was it climate change? We don't know," says Dr Nishat. "Was it unusual? Yes."

The weather in Bangladesh is going crazy. Last week, a freak tornado struck. Tornadoes occur regularly in Bangladesh - but usually only in the tornado season, in April. A tornado in February is almost unheard of.

Also, there were the strange events of 2004, when the tides in the estuaries of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers stopped ebbing and flowing. The water level just stayed at high tide. The same year, the capital, Dhaka, was hit by floods so severe the ground floors of most buildings were under water, and a catfish was caught in one of the government buildings.

And in 2005, the country had no winter at all. Westerners tend to assume the whole of the subcontinent is hot all year round; in fact, Bangladesh, like much of northern India, gets quite cold in winter. Except that it didn't last year. Winter never came - with serious effects on the year's potato crop. This year, too, it has not been as cold as usual.

"We have a saying, in February, even the tigers feel the cold," says Arun Karmaker, the environment correspondent for Prothom Alo newspaper. "But these days, a visitor to Bangladesh would find it hard to believe."

Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to climate change. The entire country is basically one vast river delta, and that has always left it at the mercy of weather extremes. The villages of the south-east may often lack electricity or clean water, but a cyclone shelter is never far away. In Dhaka, the rent for a typical first-floor apartment is £52 a month. On the ground floor of the same building, it is just £37 - because the ground floor gets flooded almost every year.

But the country's climate experts say the weather is growing more extreme - and becoming unpredictable. And this is in the most densely populated country in the world, if you don't count city-states or small islands, home to 147 million people. That leaves a worrying question: what happens to those 147 million people if parts of this already overcrowded country become uninhabitable due to rising sea levels...

But what is less well known is that Bangladesh has a defence against that scenario: a huge series of dykes made of boulders that stretch along the entire coast - a literal fortification in the battle to survive climate change. The dykes were put up to protect against the storm surges Bangladesh periodically suffers from, but should be high enough to withstand the predicted rise in sea levels.

But that doesn't mean Bangladesh is safe from climate change, says Dr Nishat. "The dykes create their own problems," he says. "By trapping rainfall on the inside, they could end up causing flooding. And they do nothing to stop salinity spreading through our water."...

"People always come to Bangladesh to talk about rising sea levels," says Dr Nishat. "Have you considered that London is the same height above sea level as most of Bangladesh? You have the Thames barrier, and we have our dykes. By the time Bangladesh is flooded, you will have lost London."