Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (26 page)

Salinity is one of the four horsemen of climate change for southern Bangladesh described by the country’s leading environmentalist, the IPCC author Atiq Rahman. The next is cyclones. While warming’s effect on tropical storms is hotly debated, a general consensus is emerging: Whether or not it increases their frequency, it very likely increases their strength. Cyclones and hurricanes are fueled by ocean temperatures; more heat means more destructive winds. Bangladesh, long in the path of storms, is likely now in the path of larger storms. In late 2007, category 4 Cyclone Sidr—the second-biggest storm since reliable record keeping began in 1877—sliced into the Sundarbans and southwestern delta, destroying 1.5 million homes and killing more than three thousand people. In 2009, smaller Cyclone Aila left at least half a million people homeless. It sent a twenty-foot-high wave crashing over fields and into mangroves: With sea levels higher, there is more water to push around, and storm surges are all the more damaging.

The third horseman is increased flooding. Seasonal flooding is normal in Bangladesh, and in many ways positive. A typical monsoon season sees as much as 30 percent of the country underwater as the Brahmaputra, Padma, Meghna, and dozens of other rivers swell with rain and overtop their banks. Farms flood, families are displaced, and some riverine islands, known as
chars,
disappear entirely. But new
chars
are created as the rivers discharge their billion-plus tons of sediment, and a new layer of mineral-rich soil remains when the waters recede. The soil allows Bangladeshi farmers to plant and sow a remarkable three crops a year. Flooding is like the greenhouse effect itself: It makes life possible. Only in excess—a modified monsoon, a higher Bay of Bengal—does it extinguish it. Flat, slow rivers, having less elevation to drop than before, were becoming yet flatter and slower, and seasonal floods were starting to last longer and spread farther. A Dutch-designed, foreign-financed system of dikes and embankments built in the 1960s was worse than useless: Rather than keeping water out of the delta’s cropland, the barriers often trapped water on the wrong side, turning fields into ponds. The Dutch were now hawking updated technologies via their embassy.

The fourth horseman requires little explanation: A sea-level rise of three feet by 2100—or whatever the global average will translate to in Bangladesh—will permanently submerge at least the southern fifth of the country, simple as that. The people who live there, twenty to thirty million of them, will have to go somewhere else.

 • • • 

THERE WAS A STANDARD
tour route for foreign journalists reporting on Bangladesh’s woes: south on the river ferries from Dhaka, its capital, to the saline, overcrowded delta, to the
chars,
to the Sundarbans, and to the villages flattened by Cyclone Sidr. Almost as soon as I crossed over from India, I found myself following it. My guide for the tour was Atiqul Islam Chowdhury, or Atique, an unflappable, unfailingly polite man in his thirties from the local nonprofit COAST, which focuses on “survival strategies for coastal poor.” Our deal was straightforward: I paid his way for what amounted to a week of site visits and meetings that his organization could not otherwise easily afford, and in return he gave me access to villages and to his sense of quiet indignation.

I’d come across the border on the newly reopened Maitree Express, or Friendship Express, a Kolkata-Dhaka train that had been closed for forty-three years and was now touted as the start of a new entente between India and Bangladesh. Much of the 230-mile rail trip was on elevated tracks above the latter’s rivers and
chars,
which were visible out the picture windows but blurred by speed and distance, as if part of a different reality. But when Atique and I rode the
Parabat,
or “Pigeon,” a large, southbound night ferry from Dhaka, such distance was harder to attain. He had booked us an air-conditioned cabin with a small TV and an outlet to charge my cell phone, but the waters of Dhaka’s Buriganga River were only three decks down, the masses only two decks down. There was a blackout in Old Dhaka the night we left, and on the opposite bank was a shipyard where the sparks of welders’ torches periodically brightened the humid sky, like lightning. We got chai and samosas from an attendant, then the ferry’s foghorn blared. As we pulled away from the dock, we could see the faint hulk of the massive city fading away, and for the rest of the night there was only whatever appeared in the beam of the ferry’s spotlight. It swiveled back and forth, operated by rope and pulley. A bearded man stood by, tugging on one side, then the other. The rules of the river were like the rules of the Bangladeshi road: When the spotlight-wallah’s beam caught smaller ships or wooden, gondola-like sampans ahead of us, the ferry began blasting its horn, and they got out of our way before we ran them over.

We arrived in the city of Barisal at dawn, and Atique hailed a rickshaw that would take us to the crowded bus that would take us farther south on a series of crowded, two-lane roads. There were huts and rice paddies and palm trees and people and shrimp farms on both sides of the road, but as in Malta not once was there an empty, uncultivated, perfectly natural space. The shrimp farms consisted of rectangular ponds hemmed in by dirt walls, and they were a relatively recent addition to the landscape, the result of two trends: Bangladesh’s growing need for export dollars and the delta’s creeping salinity. Shrimp has become the country’s second-largest source of foreign income, after textiles, and each year as many as a hundred million pounds of it now flow out to some of the world’s biggest emitters of carbon: half to Europe, a third to the United States, and most of the rest to Russia and the Middle East. When Bangladeshis gave up farming rice in favor of shrimp, it was sometimes hailed as climate adaptation, but it was lopsided: Shrimp farming requires far fewer workers, and the profits are largely kept by exporters and middlemen. Small farmers did not switch to shrimp themselves so often as they sold or leased their land to the country’s small oligopoly of shrimping families, then migrated to Dhaka or beyond.

Where there were still rice paddies, yields per acre were going down. Seasonal food shortages were already such a way of life that they had a name: the
monga
. The Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) and international partners would soon begin large-scale tests of salt-tolerant rice, hoping to keep up with the rising seas. The BRRI’s first varieties were conventionally bred and distributed for free in southern Bangladesh, though it was also working on genetic modification. Other varieties being developed across the world—including by Monsanto, which had an office in Dhaka despite being dropped from a deal with the country’s Grameen Bank after activists protested in the late 1990s—were genetically modified for expected profit. Bangladesh, where the average person emits 0.3 tons of carbon a year—a seventieth of the average American—could do little more about climate change than try to adapt to it. Elsewhere in the country, NGOs were creating floating gardens: mats of water hyacinth covered with soil, cow manure, and seeds that grew into gourds or okra. They turned a riverboat into a floating school, and they bought other boats to serve as rescue arks during flooding, even training locals as their pilots. It was reminiscent of another program in a similar climate-threatened, rice-growing, shrimp-exporting delta, the Mekong in Vietnam, where the government and international donors began distributing life jackets and teaching children how to swim. But only in Bangladesh were families told to raise ducks, not chickens. Ducks float.

Atique and I saw a more typical adaptation effort in the town of Mirzakalu, on the banks of the lower Meghna, the megariver formed after the Padma, Brahmaputra, and hundreds of other tributaries flow together. South of a small ferry dock, a crowd of workers was lifting sandbags, mixing cement, and sliding large stone blocks into place to form a new seawall. It stretched as far down the shore as we could see. The ground was so covered with sandbags that Atique and I skipped from one to the next, as if they were stepping-stones, in order to reach the foreman. “This embankment is temporary,” Atique said, even before we got to the man. “Within six months, it will go away. Just look behind it.” I looked, and I saw the beginnings of a second, higher seawall five hundred feet inland—the backup plan. The workers gathered around us, and we asked them how many times walls had been built here. They argued among themselves. “Seven, eight times,” Atique finally translated. Shortly before Cyclone Sidr, the shoreline had been a mile “that way,” one man explained, and he pointed toward the middle of the broad river. The foreman told us that they had been working on this latest seawall for three weeks, laying some ten thousand blocks and forty-five thousand sandbags. The blocks weighed 120 kilograms, or 265 pounds, the sandbags 160 kilograms. Most of the workers came from Rangpur, in far northern Bangladesh, adjacent to Enamul Hoque’s hometown of Dhubri in Assam; only Rangpuris could easily lift the blocks and sandbags. Two of the men ripped off their shirts to show me where they carried the loads on their backs. There were but a few scratches and old scars. They found a day laborer from Mirzakalu and had him take off his shirt, too. His back was bleeding from half a dozen cuts.

Some of the locals displaced by erosion had gone to new
chars
still growing in the middle of the Meghna—the sediment of the Himalaya or Assam, deposited here. To visit them, Atique and I climbed into a wooden fishing boat and sailed across the chocolaty water. Soon we were skirting mud flats and entering a canal flanked by low fields, thatched huts, and a few tin-roofed shacks. Children swam in the canal, and fishing boats were moored along its mud banks. The
char,
first settled in the 1970s, was named Zahiruddin. In 2002, the last time it was surveyed, it covered almost fifteen square miles and had eight thousand residents; by now, the population was surely bigger, but no one could say if that was true of the
char
itself. It had no dikes. It had few cyclone shelters—concrete structures on concrete stilts—though the government was building hundreds of them all over the mainland. Its residents were among the most vulnerable people in the world. We docked the boat and wandered around the
char
’s fields, trying to find someone to talk to, but the day was too hot; almost everyone was inside his hut. At last an old man appeared, shirtless and holding a large black umbrella for shade. He showed us the thousands of red peppers he had spread out to dry on three squares of cloth. “He is one of the fortunate ones,” Atique translated. “He came from the mainland eighteen years ago, so he has a title to his land.” Months later, when Cyclone Aila struck Bangladesh with seventy-five-mile-an-hour winds, it pushed a storm surge far up the Meghna. “Char Zahiruddin completely gone under water,” read one NGO’s report.

“Want to go to the hotel and get fresh?” Atique asked me. He meant “freshen up.” We made our way back to solid ground, and in the evening, after the air had cooled, we went to an outdoor play where performers dressed in green danced on a stage ringed by cloth and held up by bamboo struts. The subject was cyclones, and the play, underwritten by aid groups, was like an extended public service announcement. “It’s about what went wrong during Sidr,” Atique explained, “and then how the whole family can change and be ready.” The crowd of hundreds of men, women, and children sat in the dirt, in the dark, while the cast, illuminated by dim fluorescent lights, played flutes, banged on drums, sang, and yelled. One actor unrolled a large scroll, upon which were painted revolving images of a disaster: A family watching television, and the numbers 1 through 5—the cyclone intensity scale—flashing on the screen. Other people in small boats, huddled around the radio. Rickshaw drivers yelling warnings to those passing on the road. Families grabbing their gold jewelry and anything else portable and rushing out of their homes. Eventually, people filing calmly into cyclone shelters—an image that looked uncannily like the Edward Hicks painting
Noah’s Ark
. It was a hopeful play: Early warning systems, cyclone shelters, and education were why relatively few people—3,000—had died in Cyclone Sidr. Sixteen years earlier, in 1991, a similar cyclone had killed 138,000.

A million tons of rice were lost during Sidr, however, and the following spring, in the midst of the 2008 global food crisis, Dhaka was yet another place where riots broke out over the spiraling price of rice: Garment workers went on strike, smashing cars and throwing bricks at police, who responded with bullets.

One morning, Atique and I visited the fringes of the Sundarbans, hopping on motorcycle taxis that sped us down elevated paths to the village of South Khali. This and surrounding villages near the city of Bagerhat—which, like Touba, near Senegal’s Great Green Wall, was founded by a Sufi saint—were among the worst hit by the cyclone. Of the fifty South Khali families that survived the storm surge, clinging to palm trees or clustering on the second floor of the combined school–storm shelter, half had since moved away. It was the emptiest place I would visit in Bangladesh. We walked to where the path ran into the Bay of Bengal and watched fishermen untangle their nets. At the yellow two-story school that had saved people’s lives, a villager pointed out how it could be improved: If there were an entrance on the second floor, people could get inside even after the flooding began. I noticed the words on Atique’s gray T-shirt: “Beach Tour.” A fisherman eventually offered to take us across a creek into the Sundarbans, where a forest watchman in a lonely cabin told us that Bengal tigers, their ecosystem disrupted, were killing more villagers than ever before. We ventured a few hundred feet into the brush until we were advised to turn around.

On the ferry back north to Dhaka, Atique was sullen. “In fifty years, all the islands will be gone,” he finally said. “It will cause strife. Environmental refugees will have no place to go, or they will go to cities. Talk about Islam, about fundamentalism—these people will be angry. This will cause a war. Americans want to have their houses, their cars. They don’t see what it is doing to Bangladesh.” He urged me to have a look at the lower decks, so I did. They were more crowded than they had been on our way south. Each family had staked out an area of floor with a blanket, fathers, mothers, and children, together holding down their private patch. Many had large bags—seemingly all their possessions. “Do you know why?” Atique asked. “They are all moving to Dhaka.”