New Sundarbans Adaptation Center & Disaster Risk Reduction
04/04/09 08:14
A significant number of the hits to this blog are from South Asia, mostly directed at a 2008 entry on the Sundarbans islands that sit on the coast of Bangladesh and northeastern India. These islands are home to millions of very poor people, have one of the largest coastal mangrove forests in the world, and are the major refuge for the remaining Bengal tigers. These island exist in a balance between accruing sediment flowing down the Brahmaputra-Ganges rivers, the ability of the mangroves to capture the sediment, and the erosive action of the Indian ocean. A 1970s-era sediment-capturing dam upstream in combination with rising sea levels have caught the islands in a dangerous vice: sediments are no longer accumulating at sustainable levels, while tropical storm frequency and severity seem to be increasing — on top of accelerating sea-level rise. According to Arjan Berkhuysen, an expert on climate adaptation in river deltas and estuaries with WWF-Netherlands, “These problems are similar in deltas all over the world.... [We’re] looking for natural solutions that respect the dynamics of the system while helping people towards sustainable development in the face of climate change.” Happily, we have some good news about the Sundarbans: a regional Climate Adaptation Center has just been founded on Mousuni island on the Indian side on 29 March 2009.
Some 60 percent of the islands on the Indian side have lost large amounts of their sustaining forest, and these islands are literally dissolving away. WWF-India’s Mousuni Climate Adaptation Center, in partnership with WWF-Netherlands, Hewlett-Packard, and GTZ, is working with the extremely vulnerable communities on Mousuni island on a type of climate adaptation usually called disaster-risk reduction (DRR) to help them cope with high-intensity events.
Anurag Danda (email: anuragdanda at wwfindia dot net), head of WWF-India’s Sundarbans program, spoke at the inauguration of the Adaptation Center: “Mousuni island is in peril. Its neighboring island, Sagar, is recording a relative sea level rise of 3.14 mm annually, which is alarming. We have to work towards increasing the adaptive capacities of the communities before it is too late.” The island has faced serious breaches recently, some of which have been widely documented, including in the Indian media and through moving personal stories.
I’ve met Anurag and some of his staff. They are passionate, smart, and dedicated professionals who understand intuitively that climate adaptation is a process, that adaptation requires a fundamental reorientation of development, and that development must be coupled with conservation to make adaptation sustainable.
Mousuni island measures roughly 24 sq km and has a population of 20,000. While the population on the island has been on the increase, the size of the island has been diminishing due to sea-level rise. Cyclones and tidal surges have further destroyed the lives and livelihoods of the communities by breaching embankments, wrecking their homes and ruining harvests due to salt-water incursion into groundwater resources. Without intervention, these communities will certainly become climate refugees, along with people in the Maldives and Tuvalu.
DRR ideally provides two paths for climate adaptation, focusing on both immediate and long-term threats. Actions that can be counted on as soon as the next tropical storm season include an electronic early warning system to warn residents of oncoming disasters, such as powerful cyclones and storm surges that could cause rapid loss of land and life. The early warning system has been linked to Jadavpur University in Kolkata and will receive messages whenever there is an oncoming disaster. The Adaptation Center also houses relief material like medical aid. Youth on the island have also been organized into a Disaster Management Team to develop awareness and local capacity for quick reaction.
Long-term DRR climate adaptation strategies include sustainable community economic development that depends on and reinforces healthy ecosystems. For instance, the Mousuni Adaptation Center runs a book bank to loan students educational materials. More ecosystem-oriented strategies include the reintroduction of indigenous salt-tolerant rice paddies to farmers. As the market value of this variety (called tal mugur) is not far behind other high-yielding varieties, farmers on the island have been successful in maintaining their livelihood without having to worry about losing it to saltwater incursion to irrigation water and storms. The Climate Adaptation Center provides training and seeds to farmers and assists with knowledge about market values and government support schemes.
Original press release from WWF-India here. Fact sheet on the Sundarbans here.
