Coastal flooding in Bengal Bay

by Luca Catalano Gonzaga
Part of Child survival in a changing climate
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The Bay of Bengal is the area mostly affected by climate change. Cyclones, floods and monsoons that annually hit the Bay cause the destruction of entire villages and crops. Climate change and the consequent and extreme natural events influence people’s migration. In fact, every year, several movements of population from rural to urban areas occur and cause additional environmental problems, mainly in the fast-growing urban slums. Thus, improving urban development and management is essential. Climate change is expected to affect migration of people in four ways:

– The intensification of natural disasters, floods, cyclones and river erosion.

– Global warming, climate variability and other climate change effects on livelihoods, public health, food security and water availability.

– Rising of sea levels, that will reduce coastal areas habitability.

– Competition over scarce natural resources potentially leading to growing tensions and even conflicts and, consequently, people’s displacement.

The decision to migrate is often guided by the aspiration to rebuild assets damaged by the flood. In Besides the usual patterns of floods within Bangladesh, a further issue is caused by sediments piling up in rivers   restrained by embankments. Climate change is expected to further exacerbate this issue due to additional changes in sedimentation and river flows, increased monsoon rainfalls and slower rivers outflow caused by the rise of sea-levels and other hydrological dynamics. With global warming is expected to cause a one-meter rise in sea-levels during the 21st century and  Bangladesh shall lose about 17.5 per cent of its landmass. (text by Luca Catalano Gonzaga).

  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. A girl hurries to reach her hut in the village of Chalna.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Two women stand by their hut, in the village of Chalna, during the floods. Each year in Bangladesh about 26,000 square kilometres (10,000 sq mi, around 18% of the country) suffer from floods, killing over 5,000 people and destroying more than seven million homes.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Father and son are trying try to reinforce the banks of the river Pusur, to prevent floods. The Sundarbans spans nearly 4,000 square miles of India and Bangladesh along the Bay of Bengal. The world’s largest and continuous mangrove forest, it’s home to a wide variety of species. For the 7.5 million people who live in the region, the forest is a natural barrier against tides and cyclones. But as people cut the trees and rising seas bring saline waters in, the forest and the land itself are shrinking. More than a million coastal residents have already migrated north.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Day laborers repair flood defenses.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Tadeusz, 9 years old, is covered with mud because he has been helping his family shore the river banks up nearby their hut. More than 5 million Bangladeshi inhabitants live in areas highly vulnerable to cyclones and hurricanes, and more than half of the population lives within a 100km radius of the coast. Most part of the coast is less than 12 meters above sea level.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Shayekh, 11 years old, picks up the mud in Turag river, near the village of Chalna. The mud will be used to build banks to defend his hut from the floods.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. House along the river Pusur. Because of climate change, floods in Bangladesh are predicted to become more extreme due to cyclonic storm surges and rising sea levels.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. A fisherman casts his fishing-net in the Khulna District.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. A cow and her calf are trapped into the rising water. They will have to wait several hours before returning to their stable. Tidal surges isolate entire villages.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Aerial view of the Bengal region. Rising waters and illicit logging are killing the trees in the Sundarbans, the natural wall that protects the India-Bangladesh coast.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. A man takes a dip in the Ganges Delta (or Padma, as it is known in Bangladesh). Despite high levels of pollution, millions of people bask in the waters every year. The pollution is weakening the mangroves, that rely on freshwater.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Young fisherman on Sagar Island unravels his nets before heading out onto the Bay of Bengal. Cyclones and sea-level rise have made a big part of the coastal land unviable for agriculture, pushing thousands of former farmers to try their luck out at sea.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. A rice collector after a day at work. West Bengal is primarily a rural area, where rice and vegetable are the main crops.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Village of Chalna, the river banks of Pusur, got broken by the rising water-levels caused by floods. Coastal flooding, combined with the bursting of river banks is pretty common, and severely affects the landscape and population of Bangladesh.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Village of Chalna, a woman tries to save a part of her home from raising water-level of the river Pusur. For weeks, the embankment shielding East Dhangmari, in the Khulna district, had been about to sink into the Pusur River.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Along the river Pusur. A dizzying latticework of 230 rivers crisscrosses Bangladesh. Three of those rivers are the massive Brahmaputra-Jamuna, the Ganges (or Padma, as it is known in Bangladesh) and the Meghna, that flow into the Bay of Bengal.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. The Khulna District. A boy collects some branches from the trees near his hut, that he will then use as protection against the upcoming floods. Cyclones, floods and monsoons strike the entire Bay of Bengal, due the rise in rainfall and the sedimentation of the river beds, causing the destruction of crops and homes.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. A girl along the way to the village of Chalna.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. A woman crosses the river of Pusul to return to her home, in the village of Chalna.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Bangladesh is a land of rivers. It is prone to flooding as it is situated on the Brahmaputra River Delta (also known as the Ganges Delta) and its many distributaries flowing into the Bay of Bengal.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. The Khulna District. A woman is returning to her home. Coastal erosion puts one fifth of Bangladesh’s population at risk.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. The Khulna District. People transporting material for making bricks in a boat. The clay will be used to build embankments in areas where floods cause severe damage.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. The Khulna District. Mother and son prepare material for making bricks, to protect their homes from floods.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Kids playing by a stream near the village of Chalna.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Luna, 14 years old, in front of her hut.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. Mother and son in front of their home.
  • Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh 2010. The Khulna District. Families as they wait for their families to return from areas in which they might have found material to strengthen the embankments of the river Pusur, to protect their homes from floods.
  • Dhaka, Bangladesh. Submerged electric poles near the city of Dhaka.
  • Dhaka, Bangladesh 2010. View of the city crossed by the Turag river.
  • Dhaka, Bangladesh 2010. View of the city crossed by the Turag river.

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