Page 13 - Respond 2018 Magazine

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to defend these homes may be more pertinent than the
technical accuracy of measuring equipment.

Veteran Bangladeshi climate researcher Ahsan Uddin
Ahmed is sceptical of mass migration predictions. Accepting
that salinity is going to push northwards and some crops will
become unviable, he nonetheless places great faith in the
capacity of Bangladeshis to adapt.

“Salinity is no longer a hopeless scenario,” he tells Climate
Home from the office in his Dhaka apartment, expounding
knowledgeably on mango orchards, pond sand filters and
capillary action. “Through innovation and research, the tide
has been diverted in a different direction.”

The government is adding 30cm to the height of
embankments, he says: “There is no reason we would not
be able to match up with the gradually rising sea level. Our
economy will allow further protection.”

The experience of communities like Kolbari and Gabura
shows the fragility of such gains. For all their ingenuity
adopting shrimp cultivation, a tropical storm dealt a huge
setback. At category one, Aila was not even an exceptionally
strong cyclone.

And traditional defences may be counterproductive. The
levee that was supposed to protect Gabura became a
liability when the floodwater got in and could not get out
again.

A 2015 study concluded that embankments do more harm
than good, causing the land to subside.
But if the medium-term prognosis is not as clear-cut as
Recovering from such crises is putting a drag on official rhetoric implies, the ultimate destination of human-
Bangladesh’s economic growth, with the Asian Development caused global warming is sobering.
Bank forecasting annual climate losses by 2050 will amount
to 2% of GDP. Surging Seas’ “seeing choices” interactive shows that 2C
temperature rise – the upper limit countries have agreed
But none of these vulnerabilities, real as they are, lead to try and stay below – is consistent with 4.7m of sea level
inevitably to migration. rise. That turns most of southwestern Bangladesh – and the
city of Chittagong in the east – blue on the map. Unchecked
Alex Randall, migration expert at UK-based NGO Climate pollution locks in sea level rise that ultimately swamps
Outreach, argues it is futile to try and quantify climate half the country, including its three biggest cities: Dhaka,
migration. “Large numbers of people are already moving Chittagong and Khulna. The timescale for this could be
from rural areas in Bangladesh into cities. It makes more anywhere from 200 to 2,000 years.
sense to see climate change as a force that adds to this
existing trend, rather than trying to pick out a number of “It is very plausible that the amount of carbon we put in the
people who will move because of climate change,” he says. atmosphere between today and 2050 will determine whether
Bangladesh can even exist in the far future,” says Strauss.
In some cases, climate impacts may even prevent people “Our emissions pathway does not make a big difference
moving, he adds, as they become too poor to make the for mid-century sea level rise. It makes a consequential
leap. “The ways in which climate change will re-shape difference by the end of the century and it makes an
patterns of rural to urban migration in Bangladesh are not existential difference after that for Bangladesh.”
straightforward.”

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