Before the flood

Global warming is threatening Bangladesh's coast. But the area's tens of millions of residents don't want to move.

Editor's note: Early Signs: Reports From a Warming Planet is a joint project of the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Salon and NPR's "Living on Earth." The series runs Fridays through May 5 in Salon, and you can find radio versions of each story on "Living on Earth's" Web site. Read about how the series came into being here.

By Emilie Raguso and Sandhya Somashekhar

Read more: Politics, News, Global Warming, Climate Change, Early Signs: Reports from a Warming Planet

April 21, 2006 | SHYAMNAGAR, Bangladesh -- In a wide clearing fringed with banana fronds, dusk brings the buzz of a thousand mosquitoes. Nearby, a generator's rumble splits the cool air. Eight musicians settle onto a brick stage in the village center, bringing with them the tapping of a dhol drum, the wheeze and drone of a harmonium, the shuffling of sandaled feet. The darkened platform bursts with light as a young woman begins to sing, drawing the villagers from their clay huts. Bundled in scarves and shawls, they press close as the drama begins.

There are no movie theaters in this remote village in southwestern Bangladesh, not far from the Indian border, and few families own a television. So theater, popular across South Asia, is a favorite entertainment. But the catchy tunes and high drama of this particular show, called "Environmental Thinking: Where Will We Go?" announce a grave warning. In the play, a community struggles to withstand floods, storms and saltwater intrusion caused by global warming -- a scenario that is unfolding, slowly, in this very village.

"If the flood comes, what will happen to us? There will be a shortage of drinking water. We'll suffer from ailment and disease," the opening song goes. "In starvation and malnutrition, all people will die. Ducks, chickens, cows and goats, none will exist anymore."

Beneath a canopy supported by bamboo poles, cast members speak into microphones hung with twine. They use wide sashes dyed marigold, red, turquoise or green to create scenes of boats and benches, tea stalls and carnivals.

Mohon Kumar Mondal watches from the front row, his broad face illuminated by the glow of the stage. Dressed in jeans and a gray sweater zipped to his chin, his Western clothes belie his roots, which are firmly planted in this verdant region a few miles inland from the Bay of Bengal. The cast members onstage, he says in his native Bengali, are not simply actors. They are fighters in a war against climate change. Their play is part of a regional education effort to alert southwestern Bangladeshis about how changing climate affects their lives. But, he fears, "the war will end before we can win."

He is most concerned about the residents of coastal communities. "In my case, since I am quite educated, I can go to Dhaka [the country's capital, roughly 130 miles inland] and live quite happily," he says. "But what will happen to my neighbors and relatives who are really uneducated, who don't even know what climate is, what weather is, not even what is going on in the outside world? For them the disaster will be unexpected, so they are going to die."

It is a despondent moment for Mondal, 29, who usually conveys a dogged optimism. As the head of a local environmental organization called Working for Coastal People, he spends much of his time trying to persuade people to stick by their ancestral homes. But as the planet warms at an alarming speed, optimism is becoming harder to muster. This is especially true with respect to Bangladesh -- a poor country the size of Wisconsin, bursting with a population nearly half that of the United States. On top of rampant illiteracy, poverty and disease, the country suffers year after year from devastating natural disasters.

Now they're also suffering from the effects of climate change. Experts say warmer global temperatures will increase the intensity of cyclones that form over the Bay of Bengal, sending more violent storm surges crashing into the coast. The saltwater front will crawl further inland, rendering farmland unusable and polluting much of the country's drinking water. The Sundarbans National Forest, a wild swath of mangroves that plays an important role in the nation's ecology, could be wiped out. Most alarmingly, as much as 18 percent of the land could slip into the bay in the next 100 years because of rising sea level, according to the World Bank. That would displace as many as 30 million people.

The country is scrambling to prepare for the impending disaster, but a lack of funding hampers their efforts. And because Bangladesh cannot independently finance its own climate-change preparations, it must rely on outside input and funding. Last year, with money from the United Nations and the United Kingdom, the Bangladeshi government set up a climate-change division within the Ministry of Environment, and a coalition of government officials and nongovernmental organizations recently completed a detailed study of the country's preparedness for the impact of global warming. These important steps could not have been accomplished without international assistance, but assistance comes with a price -- NGOs and foreign governments help direct much of the country's climate-change planning. As a result, preparedness planning in Bangladesh is a complex orchestration of local needs, government approval and aid agency agendas.

If there is one organizing principle for the government's approach to climate change, it is that the country must focus on adapting to the changes rather than relocating substantial parts of the population. Rafiqul Islam, of the country's Integrated Coastal Zone Management department, manages the 360 miles of rugged coastline that runs along the Bay of Bengal, a densely populated region that is home to some of the country's poorest people. The coastline will be first to feel the effects of climate change, but Islam says evacuating the area is not an option. On average, about 2,594 people are crammed into each square mile of the country. Where, Islam asks with a wry chuckle, where would all those people go? "In the international community, one can talk about the displacement of millions of people, but we cannot think in that fashion," he says dismissively. "We need to adapt. Whatever resources we have, we have to play with that."

These adaptations, experts like Islam say, must combine science and the survival techniques developed by resourceful people in disaster-prone areas. For instance, an isolated group of farmers in the south have long relied on gardens that float on water, planted on beds of water hyacinth. By improving on this technology and spreading it in areas that are likely to see more floods, government officials and NGOs hope they will increase the country's resilience to the increased flooding that climate change will bring.

Some scientists, like Ainun Nishat, a water-resources expert and leading climate-change researcher in Bangladesh, believe predictions of large-scale inundation are overblown and that mass migration won't be necessary. Nishat refers to a network of embankments, built along the southern coast in the 1960s, that he believes will provide some measure of protection from the sea.

"The countries which do not have dikes already are thinking of constructing dikes, but we already have those dikes," he says. "Now, we need to do two things: raise the height of the dikes, because with the sea level rise, if the storm surge comes in, some of these dikes could be ineffective. And the drainage structures would have to be changed so that the rainfall falling inside could be drained out."

Climate scientists outside Bangladesh, however, are less hopeful.

"The picture for Bangladesh, if nothing is done to limit greenhouse gas emissions, is very bleak," says leading Princeton climatologist Michael Oppenheimer. "They can protect their citizens from an out-and-out, day-to-day disaster, but in the long term the land is going, going, gone for a good chunk of the country. The wealthy countries -- like the U.S., like Japan, like China and India -- that pump out large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions will have to start to act in a serious way to curtail those emissions. Otherwise, not just Bangladesh, but large sections of the developing world and ultimately countries like our own will succumb."

When outsiders predict the worst for their country, many Bangladeshis smile. Those with even a basic understanding of climate change note with bitterness that this problem was largely caused by the gas-spewing West -- Bangladesh emits less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, compared to 24 percent for the United States -- but they are the ones who will pay the price.

And besides, Bangladeshis like to tell foreigners, their country has weathered just about everything nature has hurled at them: famine, hurricanes, mudslides, earthquakes, drought. "Bangladesh has all the natural disasters except for volcanoes," says Mahfuz Ullah, a well-known journalist and environmental activist. "This is another natural disaster for us. We all want to survive, and this survival instinct will always keep people floating above the water."

Next page: "No matter what happens with the climate, I will never leave"