Over his 45 years, Siddique Ur-Rahman, a Bangladeshi rice farmer, has watched as his world has been gradually swallowed by water.
During his youth his family cultivated 7.2 acres along the Kholpotua River, a waterway then so narrow that villagers standing on one bank could call across to those on the other side. But as the riverbed silted up, the waters rose and spread, submerging vast swathes of low-lying paddy land, including Mr Rahman’s family’s fields.
By 1997 Mr Rahman had started working in shrimp farms fed by the Kholpotua’s waters, which had grown increasingly saline as rising sea levels pushed salty water deeper into Bangladesh’s low-lying river deltas.
Then, in May this year, southern Bangladesh was battered by cyclone Aila and a tidal surge, which destroyed 1,700km of embankments, including those protecting Mr Rahman’s village of Lebu Bunia. Villagers’ homes, livestock and belongings were all washed away.
Today Mr Rahman and 73 other shell-shocked families from Lebu Bunia live on the narrow finger of the embankment’s remains, as do nearly 1m other Aila survivors. Twice each day at high tide, water rushes over their ruined lands – making it impossible for them to rebuild their homes. Each month at full moon the water rises so high it almost engulfs the embankment.
“We feel so weak,” Mr Rahman said, surveying the bleak, denuded landscape. “Every day we are suffering. Every day the tide is coming and submerging our lands. We just sit here and think ‘what are we going to do? How are we going to cope?’*”
Lebu Bunia – with its ruined lands and desperate survivors – offers an alarming glimpse into a possible future if the international community fails to agree a meaningful plan to tackle global warming in the coming months.
Tropical island nations such as the Maldives, an Indian Ocean holiday paradise, have been well recognised for their extreme vulnerability to the effects of global warming, especially after Mohamed Nasheed, the Maldives’ media-savvy president, vowed to set aside some of the archipelago’s $1bn annual tourist revenues to purchase a new homeland for his country’s 300,000 citizens.
But the human dislocation that unchecked global warming could cause in the Maldives is dwarfed by the scale of the threat to Bangladesh, one of the world’s most densely populated countries. Scientists see it as the nation that will be hardest hit by the consequences of climate change.
A geologically fragile, low-lying delta region, Bangladesh, with 143m people, serves as the drainage system for south Asia’s two most powerful rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, and has long been prone to flooding and coastal erosion.
But Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advance Studies, warns that rising sea levels and accelerated glacier melt from global warming could lead to about 17 per cent of Bangladesh’s land area – home to about 35m people – being permanently submerged in the coming decades. That could trigger a migration of unprecedented magnitude – with explosive social consequences – in the Indian subcontinent and beyond.
“Millions of people will be moving. No amount of nuclear submarines will be able to stop that,” warns Mr Rahman, who was also a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel peace prize in 2007 for its work on climate change.
In expectation of the human flood, many Bangladeshi academics and activists are already calling for UN protocols to facilitate the international migration of those displaced by the effects of global warming, which they blame largely on thedeveloped world. “I will demand a part of Texas and I will demand part of Florida as part of Bangladesh,” said Mr Rahman. “It’s your carbon that has displaced these people.”
Four months after cyclone Alia, such thoughts are far from the minds of Lebu Bunia’s stricken villagers. Most are still clinging to the hope that their government will repair the 50-year-old embankments, so they can rebuild their lives within the security of their traditional community.
But about 19 families from the community have already left, drifting to other districts or nearby towns, and the exodus will undoubtedly accelerate if the flood walls are not fixed soon.
Charities say about 25 per cent of the families who lost their homes in cyclone Aila have left the stricken area in search of a more hospitable environment.
“If we stay here it’s impossible to educate the children,” said Jamilla Khatu, a mother of two, who now contemplates joining her brother in the distant capital, Dhaka.
Abdul Mannan’s three male cousins have already taken their families to relatives in a nearby town, and the 50-year-old fears he too could be forced to leave. “How can we live here if the embankment is not built?” he said.
“Every night we hear the sound of the waves. We can’t sleep because we are afraid that we will be washed away.”
