South Asian rivers experience the best and worst of treatment. The Ganges river — also called Ganga or Ganga Ma (Mother Ganges) — is treated like a sacred body, even a person or god, by hundreds of millions of people. Her many tributaries and branches are part of a sacred continuum spanning between the Himalayas and the Indian ocean. This year, there is a great mela in Varanasi, India, a mass event relishing the river that will involve hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who come to wash the sins of their current and previous lives away. Melas occur every twelve years, and they are widely described as the largest peaceful gathering of humans on the planet. In many towns and villages along the Ganga, you see ghats, which are steps going down to the water for bathing. Many people also hope to bring the ashes of their relatives to the river so they have find absolution and release. Several times I’ve seen funeral pyres on the banks of the Ganges or, during the dry, in the dry riverbed. The faithful depths of the Ganges are inspiring, even for those weak in faith.
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Tags: travel, india, Dolphins'

I’m always a mess on the flight home, but I thought this was a unique, solitary experience until today (or whatever 20 hours ago is in the context of a three-continent plane ride). The lesson came in a taxi on the way to the sprawling Delhi international terminal, my mobile rang — my hydrological colleague who was in Guatemala was calling. He was in a cab as well, also headed to an airport on the way home. If I have a brother in water, it must be B.
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Tags: travel, hydropower, nepal, india, guatemala

A controversy has been brewing over glaciers and climate change, especially the glaciers of the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau, a vast region that spans India, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nepal, the Tibetan region of China, and other parts of China too. The conflict began last November after the Indian government produced a report on their part of the Himalayas, focusing on how the leading edges of their glaciers (called the snout) have been trending over the past century or so. Were the snouts advancing? Retreating? Using many lines of evidence, the report stated that the snouts of their glaciers were mostly retreating, but some were advancing. The most important conclusion of the report was that the movement of the snouts did not seem to be related to climate change.
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Tags: india, glaciers, pachauri, ipcc, unfccc, teri, water management

What does a village in the Sundarbans look like? We have already posted some photos of the village of Tipligheri that show how the residents here been affected by Tropical Storm Alia in May 2009 — and by extension how vulnerable such villages are to other tropical storms, which are strengthening in intensity as a result of climate change. My report here is in continuation of myupdate (ED: Anurag Danda’s) of 22 June profiling the impacts of Tropical Storm Alia on one village in the Sundarbans and the necessary recovery steps we are envisaging as part of the disaster risk reduction work of the Sundarbans Climate Adaptation Center. For those not familiar with the Sundarbans, Tipligheri stands in for many other villages in the region and is typical in many ways for the millions of people living in the Sundarbans.
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Tags: climate adaptation, asia, india, drr

In this entry, Anurag Danda, the program coordinator for the Sundarbans Adaptation Center, discusses recent relief efforts and the possibilities for long-term solutions to the ongoing climate-driven crises for people and species in the Sundarbans. Can the escalating problem of tropical storms and cyclones such as May 2009’s Alia be prevented or mitigated? Is there even a future for the Sundarbans as inhabited islands? — JM Read More...

Tags: india, climate adaptation, bangladesh, Development, asia

I’ve made two changes to the site today. First, given the large number of emails I receive listing events, courses, and grant RFPs relating to climate adaptation, I’ve created a tab that lists these links. I make no promises, but hopefully some of the leads prove useful. Also, given the high level of interest on climate issues around the Sundarbans islands off of India and Bangladesh, particularly in light of tropical storm Alia in late May, I’ve created another tab that collects these stories and updates, including a set of photos from some relief efforts that immediately followed the aftermath. Read More...

Tags: india, news

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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Tags: india, drr, bangladesh, community adaptation, Development

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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Tags: india, climate adaptation, wetlands, mangroves, bangladesh, drr, asia

A colleague closely affiliated with WWF who is now at Australian National University has just written an excellent series of climate adaptation case studies. Jamie Pittock, the author, is in the highest tier of international freshwater conservation and policy advocates. I highly recommend downloading the 6.5 mb file. A major recommendation behind this and a companion overview of climate adaptation that I wrote with another colleague, Tom LeQuesne, is maintaining healthy freshwater species and ecosystems is the key to keeping reliable and high-quality freshwater resources for societies, economies, and livelihoods Read More...

Tags: news, climate adaptation, policy, india, africa, china, Danube, yangtze river, europe, mexico, north america, brazil, south america

April 2009: Note that some progress has been made — after reading the entry below, read the update here.

When I was an academic biologist, I certainly felt passionately about climate change, but (a) no one really listened to me, (b) I could say pretty much anything I wanted without fear of repercussion (or hope for influence), and (c) most of the impacts seemed -- ultimately -- rather theoretical. That’s no longer the case. I frequently give talks where I have to fight the urge to suppress strong feelings, usually anger or grief. Normally I do a pretty good job. But the feelings are there, whether or not they’re visible. Perhaps the most moving climate-related conversation occurred last April in New Delhi, about a place that I knew almost nothing about before a year ago: the network of islands off the Bangladeshi and eastern Indian coasts called the Sundarbans. They are arguaby among the most important and threatened ecosystems on the planet today. Read More...

Tags: india, climate adaptation, ethics, resilience

Last April, I was in India for about a week, wandering between the Delhi and the foothills of the Himalayas with some colleagues, taking overnight second-class sleeping car train rides and long rural cab trips. But my schedule was pressing and I needed to complete some work in Delhi with some colleagues there before I returned west a day earlier than the rest of my colleagues. And I left the hill town of Mussouri and took a frightening little plane ride back to the great metropolis is Delhi. Thus began one of the strangest of my travel experiences so far. Read More...

Tags: travel, india

I leave for the UK and India a week from today, flying about two-thirds of the distance around the planet to work on two rivers: the Thames in Britain and Ganga (the Ganges in most of the rest of the world) on the Indian subcontinent. Much of what I’ll be doing in both places is just listening – hearing what experts in each of these basins are afraid of, what they hope for, what seems likely to happen, what is happening. Listening is good work, and comforting too. And it is very good to know and see people who really “know” things. Read More...

Tags: philosophy, travel, india, united kingdom

A few weeks after I officially began my job at WWF, I was in a meet & greet call with a staffer from the UK office. He said, We're headed to India in about a week. Perhaps you should meet us there? I was still fairly uncertain what my job was going to be about, but I knew I would be working with Tom and the Indian office quite a bit, so I said, Sure. And booked a ticket.

My arrival and first two days were a whirlwind of meeting and very general discussions, and I'm sure I seemed very nervous. Being 15 hours off of my native time zone didn't help any. And not surprisingly I found myself very awake at 4 am one morning, in a strange hotel in a national park in Rajasthan. Read More...

Tags: india, ethnocentrism