Flood threat to Bangladesh

Amy Yee in New Delhi

If climate change continues unabated, the plight of Bangladesh, which wages an annual battle against floods, provides a grim lesson for many other parts of the world. It will lose the war against rising water.
   "If the sea level predictions are true, parts of the country will simply disappear," said Jo Scheuer, deputy country director of the United Nations Development Programme in India.
   Most parts of Bangladesh are less than 10m above sea level, so rising seas coupled with storm surges could put large parts of the population and agricultural land under threat of severe flooding.
   The toll would be catastrophic for a country where half its population lives below the poverty line.
   South and East Asia, including Vietnam, Bangladesh, India and parts of China, including Shanghai, will be most vulnerable to climate change because of their large coastal populations in low-lying areas, according to the UK International Institute for Environment and Development.
   Poor countries, which consume little energy per capita relative to developed countries, have historically played the smallest role in producing carbon emissions.
   The average Briton, for example, produces 48 times more carbon dioxide than someone in Bangladesh. India's per capita annual energy consumption was 594 kWh in 2003 compared with 14,057 kWh in the US.
   But India, Bangladesh and other countries in the region face some of the biggest threats, including melting glaciers and more severe storms, floods and droughts caused by depletion of glacier-fed rivers. Rising sea levels and warmer temperatures would also fuel malaria and other diseases.
   RK Pachauri, director-general of the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, said: "The worst sufferers will be the poorest in these countries. Yet they are hardly the ones who have caused the problems in the first place."
   Based on current trends, average global temperatures could rise 3°C by 2100, according to estimates by the International Panel on Climate Change.
   Melting glaciers would increase flood risk in the wet season and sharply reduce water in the dry season to one-sixth of the world's population living mainly in the Indian sub-continent, parts of China and South America. The impact on India's agriculture, which supports 70 per cent of its population and relies on monsoon rains, would be severe. "Foodstocks worldwide will be under pressure," said Mr Pachauri.
   While India has a natural annual monsoon season, heavy rains in central India between 1981 and 2000 were more intense and frequent than in previous decades. "A substantial increase in hazards related to heavy rain is expected over central India in the future," wrote a team of scientists led by B.N. Goswami of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in the December issue of the journal Science.
   The findings come a year after more than 1,000 people died when flash floods from heavy rain hit Mumbai in August 2005. A record amount of rain fell in just 24 hours.
   *Al Gore, the former US vice-president, and Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the Canadian activist, were nominated for the 2007 Nobel peace prize for raising awareness about the threat of climate change. "They ... put climate change on the agenda in global politics,'' said Heidi Soerensen, a Norwegian MP, who made the nominations with fellow MP Boerge Brende.
   Courtesy: The Financial Times

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