Background
- Coastal zone occupying world’s largest delta
- Over 10,000km2 of Southern Bangladesh and India on Bay of Bengal
- Formed from deposited sediment from 3 rivers – Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna
- Natural climax ecosystems are mangrove forests and swamps
Coastal Processes
- Primary natural process shaping area is tidal action
- Network of interconnecting river channels flows across clay and silt deposits
- Larger channels are normally straight and up to 2km wide flowing north to south because of tidal currents
- Smaller channels are called khals – drain land with each powerful ebb tide
- Non-cohesive sediments (eg. sand) are washed out the delta and deposited on banks/chars at river mouths – blown onto sand dunes
- Finer silts and washed into bays and deposited – wave action adds and shapes further deposits forming new islands
- Dense mangrove forests are home to endangered Royal Bengal Tiger
- Forests have sustained local populations for generations
Opportunities
- Very important ecosystem for locals – lots of economic and environmental opportunities
- Goods: fuel (firewood/charcoal), construction materials (timber/poles), household items (furniture/glue), food/drink (seafood/leaves and fruits/honey/cooking oil), other (medicine/animal food)
- Services: protection (flood/shoreline erosion), provision (breeding ground/fishing ground), maintenance (biodiversity and genetic resources/ecosystem resilience/organic matter and fertility), value (cultural, spiritual and religious/recreation and tourism/heritage)
Challenges
- Some people view the area as uninhabitable due to some of the great challenges associated with it
- Natural: flooding, cyclones, high salinity in soil, instability of islands, human-eating tigers
- Human: over-exploitation of coastal resources, conversion of wetlands to intensive agriculture and settlement, destructive fishing techniques, resource-use conflicts, lack of awareness of coastal issues by decision-makers
Response to challenges: resilience
- Goods and services provided allow population to remain resilient
- Mangrove forests provide great resilience – protection and shelter against storm winds, floods, tsunamis, coastal erosion
- Density of 30 trees per 0.01 hectares can reduce destructive force of tsunami by up to 90%
- Fertility of soil and ecological diversity provide great supply of nutritious food
- One hectare of mangrove forest has annual economic value of $12,000 – fishing, timber/tannin production etc
Response to challenges: mitigation
- People of Sundarbans can moderate risks in various ways
- Before more recent human pressures, people used many open access natural resources – khas land (owned by government so protected for use by local populations), wetlands and fisheries, forests
- 3500km of embankments built to prevent flooding – gradually being eroded so perhaps not that effective
- Significant investment in infrastructure to combat threat of natural disasters
- Livelihood assets are important to mitigate challenges
- Financial – savings, credit etc
- Physical – housing, tube wells, electricity, tools etc
- Natural – land, water etc
- Social – NGOs, local networks
- Human – people, health, education
- Mitigation and resilience has become more difficult in recent years – people struggle more with livelihood assets so poverty and marginalisation increases due to:
- Less open access resources – deforestation etc
- Degradation of ecosystems
- Corruption of local and national political institutions
- Conflicts over land ownership
- Increasing deaths by tigers – if a woman’s husband is killed by a tiger, she will struggle to live herself
Response to challenges: adaptation
- Due to climate change, future generations may struggle to adapt to the conditions in the Sundarbans
- There will be many future challenges:
- Increased frequency and intensity of floods
- Shrimping industry builds permanent embankments which encourage deposition of silt so raising river water levels
- Rising temperatures contribute to soil salinity
- Increased pesticide and fertiliser affects water quality
- Changes to seasonal rainfall patterns
- The populations of the Sundarbans have developed ways in which they adapt to the conditions and changes:
- Grassroots NGOs run education programmes – farmers encouraged to return to ecologically friendly methods
- NGOs give preparation for natural disasters
- USAID trains communities to be resilient to climate shocks – 30,000 people received training on improving agricultural techniques
- Salt-tolerant rice varieties – can survive submersion in sea water for over 2 weeks
- NGOs built latrines on higher ground and educate communities about water-borne diseases and sanitation
- Installing storage tanks for rainwater in areas at greatest risk from salt water inundation