PATUAKHALI: “Bangladesh Under Threat as Sea Levels Rise Rapidly”, After cyclone gales tore down his home in 2007, Bangladeshi fisherman Abdul Aziz packed up what was left of his belongings and moved about half a kilometre inland, further away from storm surge waves.
A year later, the sea swallowed the area where his old home had been.
Now, 75-year-old Aziz fishes above his submerged former home and lives on the other side of a low earth and concrete embankment, against which roaring waves crash.
A resident of Bangladesh shared his dismay with AFP as he pointed towards what used to be his village, now submerged under the advancing ocean. He observed fish swimming where once stood his community, highlighting the rapid encroachment of the sea onto coastal lands in Bangladesh.
According to government scientists, Bangladesh’s densely populated coastal regions are experiencing rapid inundation due to rising sea levels driven by climate change. This phenomenon is occurring at one of the fastest rates globally, prompting concerns about the displacement of at least a million coastal residents within a single generation.
“Few countries experience the far-reaching and diverse effects of climate change as intensely as Bangladesh,” Abdul Hamid, director general of the environment department, wrote in a report last month.
The three-part study calculated the low-lying South Asian nation was experiencing a sea level rise in places more than 60 per cent higher than the global average.
By 2050, at present rates of local sea level rise, “more than one million people may have to be displaced”, it read, based on a quarter of a century of satellite data from the US space agency NASA and its Chinese counterpart CNSA.
