Bangladesh has drawn up a plan to reclaim land from the Bay of Bengal. The government wants to relocate and even rehabilitate thousands of people who have lost their homes due to extreme weather, erosion and a rise in sea level. Tropical cyclones and heavy storms displace a large number of coastal people in the country. Most of these natural calamities are linked to climate change.
According to a recent study by the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, such natural disasters leave more than 200,000 Bangladeshis homeless every year while river erosion alone claims almost 20,000 acres of the country's fertile land. The country wants to reclaim some of those lands.
According to the plan, natural movement of sediments through the country's rivers will be ensured before reclaiming new lands for relocation of displaced communities. In June, Dhaka signed a deal with the Netherlands for cooperation in land reclamation. Under the agreement, the Netherlands - another low-lying country - will implement the land reclamation project after conducting a feasibility study.
Annually, a large quantity of waterborne silt is carried by three major rivers - Padma, Brahmaputra and Meghna. Flowing through the river channels, most of the silt eventually settles in the country's southern coast touching the Bay of Bengal. If the sediment is diverted into low-lying coastal districts - like Noakhali or Bhola - through a system of cross-dams (walls constructed between islands) and polders (land surrounded by embankments), new land will emerge from the sea.
Moreover, a cross-dam holds the sediment as it travels downstream before reaching the Bay of Bengal. Since the sediment is collected behind the dams, this can create solid landmasses, large enough to live on. In fact, a huge number of smaller deltaic islands (chars) has already surfaced in the coastal areas without any human intervention. As the tide carries huge sediment deposits to Bangladesh's coastal-deltaic areas, hundreds of square kilometres of new territories will be reclaimed through construction of cross dams in those areas.
For three decades, Bangladesh has worked hard to reclaim land from the sea. Since 1977, the Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB) carried out many projects using cross-dams to hasten reclamation of land. As a result, the country has reclaimed over 1,000 sq. km of land from the sea so far. Besides, the government has identified 18 potential cross-dams to accelerate reclamation of land along the coast that would help reclaim over 600 square kilometres. Private companies would be encouraged to promote tourism and set up various industries on the reclaimed land although incentives for these remain absent in budgetary policies.
Since silting is a natural process in the Meghna estuary, a cross dam would be an effective method of land reclamation to help deal with migration and rehabilitate the victims of climate-change. If sea-level continues to rise at its current rate, the demand for new homes will rise in Bangladesh.
In 2011, the United Nations estimated that the global sea levels could rise by 98 cm by 2100 and the sea-level rise in Bangladesh's coastal region could exceed that estimate hitting one metre - this would affect 25,000 sq. km of land or 17.5 per cent of the country's total land, displacing over 31.5 million people.
Bangladesh will experience more adverse impacts of climate change in the long run. Therefore, land reclamation should be a solution to the future crises of climate change and the unexpected migration of displaced communities.
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