Abdul Gani stood barefoot at the bow of his fishing boat, gesticulating wildly from side to side, the coast to his left. He began pointing at the locations where his neighbours used to live before their homes were washed away by the water.
Further inland some had constructed temporary homes from the leftover corrugated metal and other building materials they managed to salvage, and he pointed at those too.
“We don’t have any words to describe it,” the 69-year-old said.
His own home was destroyed three years ago. The water seemed to suddenly suck the land out from under them at night, he recalled; they fled carrying just their children, and some pots and clothes.
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They were separated from one child, but thankfully reunited later. “Thousands of people have the same kind of stories as mine,” he said.
Bangladesh – nicknamed “land of the rivers” – has been described as one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, and Bhola, in its south, has been labelled climate change’s “ground zero”.
Bhola is an administrative district that includes Bhola Island, where the highest point is said to be 1.8m above sea level. Rivers, lakes and ponds criss-cross its terrain. Sections of the edges have been packed with government-issued sandbags or stone blocks, but locals say this is not enough to stop the water claiming more land.
Rising sea levels
The southern Asian country has a population of roughly 173 million people, living in a land mass just over twice the size of the Republic of Ireland. About half of its workers are employed through agriculture, the World Bank says.
Yet, by 2050, a third of Bangladesh’s agricultural GDP may be lost to climate variability and extreme events, and 13.3 million people may become “internal migrants ... due to climate impacts on agriculture, water scarcity, and rising sea levels”.
While Bangladeshis now make up the most common nationality crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, many more are migrating internally from rural areas to big cities. Gani said 10 Bhola families he knew, made homeless by river erosion, left for cities, though they were having a hard time surviving there.
Another person who left Bhola, a 70-year-old man who did not want to be named, now runs a rickshaw-renting business in the Korail slum in Dhaka. He said he was displaced nearly 40 years ago as a result of river erosion. He started out in the city doing daily jobs, then pedalling a rickshaw. “Only God knows what’s going to happen,” he said of Bhola.
The son of journalist Mohammed Nasiur Rahaman Shipu (55) moved to Dhaka more recently. Shipu gets a 10-hour overnight launch boat to the capital to visit him. The vessels carry hundreds of passengers on multiple levels: the wealthier have cabins, while others, paying reduced fees, stretch out on blankets on the lower decks.
Those Bhola locals who can afford it invest in a second property in Dhaka or Chittagong, Shipu said. On the desktop screen in his office, he scrolled through images from the last monsoon season: a man neck-high in water, trying to save the structure of a house; a woman crouching despondently after her home was washed away; children who had lost their mother; videos with roaring wind and battering rain.
Shipu travelled on a fishing boat to carry out his report, he said. Press passes and accreditations collected over decades hung on the walls round him.
“Climate change is real,” Shipu emphasised, saying the weather has become more erratic. “It’s not scheduled. Suddenly, the storm comes. The winter comes so early ... The current of the river: nowadays it’s so heavy, and it was not like that before.”
He said the most affected people are women, children and the elderly. “Usually they can’t survive this current of the river, they’re washed away.”
Shipu believes Bhola’s land mass is reducing – a conviction backed up by academic studies. One study found that between 1,235 acres and 2,471 acres of land from Bhola Island are lost annually, while noting that scientists have measured erosion rates of up to 120m on the shore.
Other new landmasses appear through accretion, though at a much lower rate. “A lot of people, like me, think this region will be washed away by the river sometime, probably in 100 or 50 years,” Shipu said.
Going deeper
At Bhola’s largest fish market, shortly after dawn, the crews on recently returned boats were organising their catches. Poor women and girls waited nearby for parts of the fish considered unsellable and unusable, or for any other charity the fishers might feel towards them.
Overfishing means crews are forced to travel further distances to catch enough fish to survive. At the same time, climate change increases the incidents of extreme weather, experts say, putting their lives increasingly in danger. As many as 50 fishers from Bhola die in storms each year, Shipu said.
“It’s getting harder. Every year we go deeper,” explained captain Mohammed Faruk (42). His crew had just returned after nine days at sea, during which they travelled about 100km away. “We’re not happy at all. We can bear the travel costs only.”
The father of three said crew members are not paid if they do not catch enough fish. Instead, they receive some food for their families.
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On the water, there is a risk of being taken hostage by “pirates”, but the weather poses the biggest danger. “It is devastating when the storm comes. I had an experience of my boat being sunk and me and my crew were in the river for two days ... We had buoys and life jackets and were floating in the water.”
A short drive away, sitting in the entrance to her home of corrugated metal and a concrete floor, was Mafia Khatun, a tiny woman in her 50s. She cried as she explained that her son Mizan had been missing for two months. The boat he was on stayed out late in rough weather and hit a land mass, she said. There were eight men on board, she believed, and the rest were rescued.
“He was a very good man. He used to take care of the family. When I was ill he always took care of me,” she said. “Every animal in the village, they are all crying, he was that kind of person.”
She said the family received no compensation from the boat owner – though he promised 150,000 taka (€1,063). Khatun was worried about her son’s three daughters, one of whom was supposed to get married soon.
The family had been displaced at least eight times in the past by river erosion, she said, but things had appeared to be getting better. “After all of those times we settled here and my son got this job, but now we are completely done for.”
‘We live here, we’ll die here’
Disasters have affected Bhola for as long as residents can remember. In 1950, the Bhola Cyclone – one of the deadliest natural disasters in known history – hit what was then East Pakistan, killing up to half a million people. In 1995, half a million people on Bhola Island were reportedly made homeless by flooding. Yet locals suggest the weather is becoming more erratic.
Farmer Lakshmi Rani (aged about 50) said that when she was child, there would be a “big storm” every five to seven years, but “now it’s much more regular, almost every year”.
During the worst of the monsoon season, she stays on her bed for as long as 12 days, to stay out of the floodwater. “Trees can knock into our houses and for those with corrugated [metal] roofs, the roof flies away,” she said.
Their mud stoves wash away and there is nowhere hygienic to go to the toilet. There can be snakes in the water, she added, and in the past, if people die as a result of the flooding, “the dead bodies float to our houses”.
The mother of three was sitting the ground, in a part of Bhola called Jinnagar, with other farmers. Geese, ducks and roosters roamed around. The same area fills with displaced neighbours who set up tents during the rainy season, she said.
Rani said some locals she knew had moved to big cities, and some even managed to succeed there, sending help for relatives left behind – though others failed and came back again.
Despite the challenges, she said she never wants to leave Bhola. “I wouldn’t move to another part [of Bangladesh]. We’re born here, we live here, we’ll die here,” said Rani.
“I like the air and sun and environment. We love this air. It’s fresher here.”
Raahat Alam assisted with this report
Supported by the Simon Cumbers Media Fund
