bangladesh
Guest Blog: Reflections from the Sundarbans: Short-Term Progress, Long-Term Strategies?
23/06/09 11:57
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From Climate Crisis to Weather Disaster: Tropical Storm Alia Strikes the Sundarbans
29/05/09 07:17
The Sundarbans are a
chain of islands spanning the mouths of the
Ganges-Brahmaputra rivers off the shores of India
and Bangladesh. They’ve been the subject of several
entries here, including some of their human,
species, and ecosystem-based
vulnerabilities to climate
change,
disaster risk reduction, and the founding of a
regional
climate adaptation center. A major tropical storm has hit
the region. The regional WWF director for the
Sundarbans is Anurag Danda, where he focuses on
community-based adaptation and assists with the
Bengal tiger program. He emailed me this morning
with an update, which I have edited here. Please
read his update, see the images he’s sent of the
damage, and consider his request for assistance.
Contact information included.
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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.
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