Believe It: Rising Sea Levels Lead to Refugee Crisis in Sundarban Delta

By Farol

The United States is the only major power in which there is serious conflict among government officials about whether or not global warming is happening. More than anything else, what makes it possible for so-called "global warming deniers" to maintain a prominent place in our national discourse is the power of the oil companies. But not too far behind that is the simple fact that most people in the United States do not feel the most drastic effects of global warming in their everyday lives. (Except, of course, for the victims of Hurricane Katrina; but Katrina was ultimately more an issue of government apathy and incompetence than global warming. Besides, nobody in power really seems to care about those people anymore).

Meanwhile, while our cowardly politicians stall, actual people's lives are already being destroyed by global warming. In the latest issue of The Observer, Douglas McDougall has a superb article detailing the ongoing destruction of the Sundarban delta by rising sea levels. You certainly won't hear about this in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, or Wall Street Journal (The Observer is a British publication). The people who live on these islands, after all, are poor and powerless—who cares what happens to them? McDougall does:

Across the delta, homes have been swept away, fields ravaged by worsening monsoons, livelihoods destroyed. It confirms what experts are already warning: that the effects of global warming will be most severe on those who did the least to contribute to it but can least afford measures to adapt or save themselves. For these islanders, building clay walls is their only option.

Lying one-third in India and two-thirds in Bangladesh, the Sundarbans are where two of Asia's biggest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, broaden and violently roll into the Bay of Bengal. The source of the problem is 1,500 miles away, at the source of the Ganges, where melting Himalayan glaciers are raising river and sea levels.

Lohachara island, once visible from Ghoramara, a mile to the east, is already gone beneath the waves, succumbing to the ocean two years ago, leaving more than 7,000 people homeless. Ghoramara itself has lost a third of its land mass in the past five years. To the north, Sagar island already houses 20,000 refugees from the tides.

According to the geologist Sugata Hazra, who is the director of the School of Oceanography Studies at Kolkata's Jadavpur University, the people of the Sundarbans are the first global-warming refugees.

He said: 'These people are victims of global warming. The accelerated melt of the Himalayan glacier is producing larger volumes of water in the rivers, water that violently carves its way through the flat delta where they live. The Sundarbans and the four million people who inhabit the Indian side are dreadfully vulnerable. The area has lost 72 square miles of land in the past few decades. This entire region is holding back a disaster and could ultimately serve as a warning of what is to come.'

The article—which goes on to detail how the refugee crisis is fueling conflict between India and Bangladesh—deserves to be read in full. While it's still true that the most catastrophic possible consequences of global warming (like a new ice age) will occur over thousands of years, McDougall's piece makes it indisputably clear that people—people who did nothing to create the situation in which they now find themselves—are already being destroyed by it. Will this fact register here in the U.S., the worst contributor to the problem? Don't hold your breath.