Rising sea levels threaten Indian islands
A damaged police station as a result of rising sea levels and
coastal erosion is seen at the Sagar island. All that separates
residents from a rising sea is a mud embankment, a fragile barrier
tasked with holding back the inevitable flood that one day will wash
away their island home. REUTERS
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India: Sheikh Alauddin, like hundreds of other residents living on
West Bengal's Moushuni island, has never heard the term "global
warming". But he is living with its consequences.
"At night we just pray to God, and hope the sea does not drown us,"
the 60-year-old told Reuters in Poilagheri village on the
sparsely-populated island, part of the Sunderbans national park and the
world's largest mangrove forest.
When the tide comes in, sea water laps at the top of a mud embankment
that towers 6 metres (20 feet) above Alauddin's adjacent house and is
all that keeps it from being washed away.
After a 10-year study in and around the Bay of Bengal, oceanographers
say the sea is rising at 3.14 millimetres a year in the Sunderbans
against a global average of 2 mm, threatening low-lying areas of India
and Bangladesh.
"At least 15 islands have been affected but erosion is widespread in
other islands as well," said Sugato Hazra, an oceanographer at Jadavpur
University in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal.
A United Nations climate panel, which grouped 2,500 scientists from
130 countries, concluded last month that human activity was causing
global warming and predicted more droughts, heatwaves and rising seas.
But for the Sunderbans, made up of hundreds of islands and criss-crossed
by narrow water channels and home to many of India's dwindling tiger
population, the threat is more immediate.
"The crops have failed due to scanty rainfall but where do we go?"
says Alauddin as his family of twelve stares at their parched farmland.
A combination of drought and then heavy rainfall this year and
increasing soil salinity have made it impossible to grow enough food to
survive on traditional agriculture alone.
"We now depend on fishing in the high seas and sometimes even eat
leaves from different plants to survive," a frail-looking Jameel Mullick
said.
At least 4 million people live in the islands spread across 9,630 sq.
km (3,700 sq. miles) of mangrove swamps.
Top climate experts on the UN panel predicted that temperatures would
increase by between 1.8 and 4 Celsius (3.2 and 7.8 Fahrenheit), and sea
levels would rise by between 7 and 23 inches (18 and 59 centimetres) to
submerge islands in the 21st century.
The impact could be even greater if ice sheets in Antarctica and
Greenland thaw. The 400 or so families living on tiny Moushuni know what
is coming.
Two nearby islands disappeared beneath the sea after residents were
forced to leave, and the sea has swallowed about 100 sq. km of mangrove
forest in three decades in the Sunderbans.
"Global warming and rising sea levels are already having a telling
effect on the tiger's habitat," said Pronobes Sanyal of the National
Coastal Zone Management Authority.
Rapid erosion over the last five years has destroyed mangrove cover
up to 15 metres inland on several islands, environment experts say. For
centuries, the mangroves fed on both saline and fresh water - tides
brought sea water upstream and mixed it with water from the Ganga and
Brahmaputra rivers.
But now rising sea levels are pushing salt water inland. Sixty year
old Ayesha Khatoon stood on top of a mud embankment in Moushuni that has
been breached at least seven times in the past 10 years.
"There was a lovely mud road surrounded by trees beyond this
embankment and we had 3 acres (1.2 hectares) of farmland which the sea
swallowed in the last few years," recalled Ayesha.
"No one visits us now and they have left us all to die," she said,
tears welling in her eyes as she hugs her young grandson.
Rapid felling of trees on the islands - in part to fuel two small
power plants - is adding to erosion woes. Dilip Maity, a farmer,
lamented how he had erred in hacking down several rows of trees, an act
which weakened and led to sea water flooding his small farm.
Alarmed, West Bengal's minister for the Sunderbans, Kanti Ganguly,
said the islands had to be protected. "We have realised it now and have
taken a decision to raise heights of the mud embankments and increase
mangrove cover in Sunderbans," he said. Oceanographer Hazra says it
might be too late.
REUTERS |