Sundarbans, India – Panchanan Dorui, a resident of Musuni Island in India's Sundarbans, has moved his house three times due to flooding and river erosion.
Each time, he moves away from the receding edge of the island to avoid displacement. He has seen rivers devour vast tracts of land. “Where shall I go? There is nowhere to go,” he laments.
The Sundarbans forest system, located in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal and neighboring Bangladesh, is a collection of low-lying islands and represents the world's largest mangrove ecosystem. It is home to several endangered species and acts as a natural barrier against cyclones, storm surges, and other environmental disasters. Forests are also a natural means of capturing and sequestering carbon.
However, the situation is changing rapidly. Four cyclones (Fani, Amphan, Bulbul and Yas) that hit India's east coast between 2019 and 2021 demonstrate that climate change and rising sea levels are making the Sundarbans' weather increasingly unpredictable. is showing.
Kalyan Rudra, chairman of the West Bengal State Pollution Control Board, says the Sundarbans are now increasingly “unsafe for human habitation”.
A recent spate of cyclones has exacerbated the climate-induced displacement that the people of the Sundarbans have faced over the past few decades. Lohatchala Island was one of the first inhabited islands to go underwater in 1996, forcing residents to relocate to neighboring islands, often without documents or title deeds. was.
In the face of limited livelihood options and underdeveloped areas, migration has become a coping strategy for many residents. There have been several waves of migration within the Sundarbans, often within the same islands, to avoid flooding caused by levee failures, tidal waves, and storm surges.
Since Cyclone Aila in 2009, distress migration due to economic vulnerability has resulted in men taking up work as informal migrant workers across India.
Female-headed households are more common in the Sundarbans than in other parts of India because of distressed migrants. However, these households are often characterized by debt burdens, large numbers of dependents, and limited livelihood options.
On the other hand, increasing salinity on land due to the action of intense cyclones and high waves that transport seawater from the Bay of Bengal to the Sundarbans delta region is hindering soil productivity.
Rising salinity forces changes in agriculture
Salinity-tolerant rice agriculture is an important form of climate change adaptation in the region and has become increasingly popular over the past decade.
However, increased salinity has also led to brackish shrimp farming on a commercial scale, causing land degradation. The health of women who work in low-paying jobs such as collecting shrimp seeds, which involves standing in salt water for up to six hours, is adversely affected.
Elevated salt levels are a major cause of reproductive health problems such as pelvic inflammation and urinary tract infections among women in the Sundarbans. Increased salinity is also leading to severe degradation of mangrove ecosystems, impacting biodiversity and causing loss of forest reserves that support local communities.
tiger's anger
Pressure on forest resources is also exacerbating human-animal conflicts in the region. In the Sundarbans, there lives a woman, a tiger widow, whose husband entered the Sundarbans reserve for fishing and collecting honey and was killed by a tiger.
Since the area was declared a tiger reserve in 1973 and the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 came into force, these deaths have not been officially acknowledged as it has become illegal for people to enter the forest. Not yet.
Pradip Chatterjee, former president of the Dakshinbanga Machajvi Forum or South Bengal Fishermen's Union, characterized the deaths of these tigers as 'bhi aini mrithu', i.e. the erasure of one's existence. It is called an unlawful death.
He points out that the local police department has refused to list the tiger's death due to its “illegality”, hampering the process of applying for compensation. It's a bureaucratic maze that requires relatives of the deceased to submit police reports and death certificates. Recently, the Calcutta High Court recognized the deaths of the tigers in a landmark judgment and ordered the West Bengal Forest Department to pay full compensation to the widows of the two tigers.
How are marginalized people marginalized?
Continued climate disasters will not only slow recovery but also exacerbate existing caste and gender vulnerabilities. Government relief after disasters, for example after Cyclone Amphan, is often selective and conditional on existing land holdings.
“Our two-room house had collapsed and a tree had fallen on top of it. We couldn't get into the house anymore,” said Neela Ghosh, a former Sundarbans resident. “But the relief workers went to houses that were undamaged and unoccupied. We are sitting outside the destroyed houses and have received very little funding.”
As erosion continues across the Sundarbans, authorities are struggling to agree on suitable areas to relocate the most vulnerable residents. West Bengal lost 99 square kilometers (38 square miles) of land to coastal erosion from 1990 to 2016, making it India's longest recorded coastline with 63% erosion. This has a direct impact on landless and remote populations living in the Sundarbans. Closest to the riverbank.
A forest ministry official said in a telephone interview that prime land across the Sundarbans has already been occupied and people at one end – usually the most marginalized and vulnerable – will simply be relocated to another. Ta. The remaining public land is not suitable for habitation or agriculture, and the only areas that can be converted to habitation or agriculture are forests, the official added. Therefore, when dealing with people displaced by erosion, government policy will have to walk a fine line between not demanding more forest land for relocation.
Rudra said decisions about where to relocate residents are made even more difficult by the fact that erosion has made some islands, including Sagar Island, where relocation plans are underway, making them unsafe for human habitation. It is said that there is
However, sedimentation is occurring in some areas of the Sundarbans, indicating potential. “We can identify areas that are less vulnerable and move the really vulnerable people there,” Rudra says.
But he stressed that it would be impossible to rebuild the Sundarbans' entire population of more than 4.5 million people, adding that relocation was not a sustainable solution as erosion would continue. “We have to live with disasters like this,” he says.
The future is in the balance
In December, the state capital Kolkata became one of the first countries to claim the Loss and Damage Fund for Climate Change Loss and Damage agreed during the UN COP28 summit. The fund also includes compensation for people displaced from the Sundarbans due to climate change.
In response to the growing threat posed by climate change, the National Disaster Management Authority has come up with a draft policy in early 2023 called India's Climate Change Adaptation Foundation. This includes coastal erosion and river erosion. The policy targets the mitigation and resettlement of people displaced by such forms of erosion, with the aim of reducing land loss, increasing economic resilience and minimizing vulnerability.
However, the future of climate resilience in this sector is uncertain, as funding allocation and spending is influenced by politics. There is an adversarial relationship between the central government and the West Bengal state government, which escalated during the investigation into the damage caused by Cyclone Yas in May 2021.
Piya Srinivasan is the India Commissioning Editor for 360info, hosted by Manav Rachna Institute of International Studies, Faridabad, India.
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info
