‘Every year we move further inland’ - Rising sea level poses challenge for India

BALI ISLAND, INDIA // The tiny hut sculpted out of mud at the edge of the sea is barely large enough for Bokul Mondol and his family to lie down.

Saltwater long ago engulfed the five acres where Mr Mondol once grew rice and tended fish ponds, as his ancestors had on Bali Island for some 200 years. His thatch-covered hut, built on public land, is the fifth he has had to build in the last five years as the sea creeps in.

“Every year we have to move a little further inland,” he said.

Seas are rising more than twice as fast as the global average here in the Sundarbans, a low-lying delta region of about 200 islands in the Bay of Bengal where some 13 million impoverished Indians and Bangladeshis live. Tens of thousands like Mr Mondol have already been left homeless, and scientists predict much of the Sundarbans could be underwater in 15 to 25 years.

That could force a singularly massive exodus of millions of “climate refugees,” creating enormous challenges for India and Bangladesh that neither country has prepared for.

“This big-time climate migration is looming on the horizon,” said Tapas Paul, a New Delhi-based environmental specialist.

“If all the people of the Sundarbans have to migrate, this would be the largest-ever migration in the history of mankind,” Mr Paul said. The largest to date occurred during the India-Pakistan partition in 1947, when 10 million people or more migrated from one country to the other.

On their own, the Sundarbans’ impoverished residents have little chance of moving before catastrophe hits. Each year, they build mud embankments to keep saltwater and wild animals from invading their crops. And each year swollen rivers, monsoon rains and floods wash many of those banks and mud-packed homes back into the sea.

Most struggle on far less than $1 a day. With five million people on the Indian side and 8 million in Bangladesh, the Sundarbans population is far greater than any of the small island nations that also face dire threats from rising sea levels.

Losing the 26,000-square-kilometre region would also take an environmental toll. The Sundarbans region is teeming with wildlife, including the world’s only population of mangrove forest tigers. The freshwater swamps and their tangles of mangrove forests act as a natural buffer protecting India’s West Bengal state and Bangladesh from cyclones.

With rising temperatures melting polar ice and expanding oceans, seas have been rising globally at an average rate of about 3 millimetres a year — a rate scientists say is likely to speed up.

That would be bad enough for the Sundarbans, where the highest point is around 3 metres and the mean elevation is less than a metre above sea level. But sea rise occurs unevenly across the globe because of factors like wind, ocean currents, tectonic shift and variations in the Earth’s gravitational pull. The rate of sea rise in the Sundarbans has been measured at twice the global rate or even higher.

A 2013 study by the Zoological Society of London measured the Sundarbans coastline retreating at about 200 metres a year.

Many scientists believe the only long-term solution is for most of the Sundarbans population to leave.

West Bengal is no stranger to mass migration. Kolkata, its capital, has been overrun three times by panicked masses fleeing violence or starvation: during a 1943 famine, the 1947 partition and the 1971 war that created today’s Bangladesh.

India, however, has no official plan either to help relocate Sundarbans residents or to protect the region from further ecological decline.

“We need international help. We need national help. We need the help of the people all over the world. We are very late” in addressing the problem, said West Bengal state’s minister for emergencies and disaster management, Janab Javed Ahmed Khan.

* Associated Press