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  Nomads of the Tides: How Bangladesh Is Preparing for Climate Change

Nomads of the Tides How Bangladesh Is Preparing for Climate Change

By Gerald Traufetter

Part 2: Taming Monster Rivers

A southerly wind is a sign of the coming summer monsoon, a time when Gerard Pichel's efforts will be put to a test. The Dutch engineer is trying to tame the rivers that swell into wild monsters during the monsoon.

Pichel is on his way to the Jamuna, as the Brahmaputra is called on the Bangladeshi side of the border. A hydrologist with DHV, an engineering firm from the central Dutch city of Amersfoort, Pichel, in a joint project with the Ministry of Water Resources in Dhaka, has secured the riverbank with dikes and two jetties protruding into the river at right angles. The last monsoon flood ripped off parts of the bulwark. "A similar disaster cannot be allowed to happen this time," says Pichel.

The Bangladeshis built the jetties at a right angle and not an oblique angle. As a result, the side facing the current is exposed to the full force of the water. "We made the same mistake in Holland in the past," says Pichel, shaking his head. "But one shouldn't have to make the same mistake twice."

He has already discovered annoying hydraulic engineering mistakes along the entire drive cross-country from Dhaka to the Jamuna: bridge openings that are too small, improperly dimensioned water-retaining structures. Besides, a lot of money is being spent on the wrong investments. The state-owned airline has just announced plans to spend more than $1 billion (€650 million) on new aircraft. For the same amount of money, millions of people could be saved from flooding. In fact, many things would be possible. Skillful engineers have developed ways to harness nature, with a well-placed dam, for example, forcing the river to deposit sediments along its edges. According to Pichel, the technology is "faster than any dredger and costs nothing."

But, as it happens, the dam has to be built manually. The scenarios unfolding before Pichel's eyes are reminiscent of the construction of the Pyramids. Using a wooden stretcher, sweat-drenched men drag blocks of stone from a junk, stumble across a bamboo plank from the ship to the dike, and drop the stone into the water.

For Pichel, climate change merely presents another engineering challenge. Besides, Indians, not global warming, are largely responsible for Bangladesh's acute flooding problems.

The country's much larger neighbor has built giant dams to harness its mega-rivers. As a result, the Indians are intervening in an equilibrium that is critical for Bangladesh. "The less water that flows from the north toward the sea, the farther the sea water penetrates up the rivers," says Pichel. The fatal outcome is salinization of fields in the south and lower crop yields.

Precisely the opposite happens during the monsoon period. To protect themselves against river flooding, the Indians open their locks, which causes flooding downstream in Bangladesh.

Climate change could cause additional melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, leading to even higher water levels in the rivers. "But that would be practically marginal compared with Bangladesh's current flooding problems," says Pichel.

Knowledge about the dangers of climate change hasn't yet reached the flat new strip of land in the Bay of Bengal. "I did hear the men in the city talking about something like that once," says Shamsun Nahar, the farmer on her little piece of reclaimed land in Hatia.

Nahar isn't sure which is worse: the whims of nature or those of human beings. Some time ago, some men from Dhaka showed up with false documents and a group of thugs, and drove her neighbors from their strip of land. "Who protects us?" she asks rhetorically. "No one!"

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

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