Salt water intrudes, upends lives in coastal Bangladesh

lives in coastal Bangladesh:- “The salt water has damaged everything,” Saleha Khatun says as she stands in front of her dry, dead farm where she used to grow pumpkin, bitter gourd, okra, spinach, and other vegetables.

Khatun lives in Boishkhali village in Satkhira, a district situated along Bangladesh’s low-lying southwestern coast, where fresh water should be abundant. But these days, she has to buy 30 liters of drinking water a week for about 30 taka (U.S. 35 cents).

“The situation is very tough ... How long can a person survive under these circumstances?” Khatun, 45, says.

She is among residents that BenarNews interviewed during a recent visit to the area, one of the places in this South Asian nation that suffers the most from the ravages of climate change.

The encroachment of seawater – a problem known as salinity intrusion – has killed crops and turned the lives of people in coastal Bangladesh upside down, the villagers say.

Fiercer storms and rising sea levels spawned by climate change have eroded wetlands and underground sources of fresh water, such as aquifers, causing salt water to seep in, researchers say. In turn, this threatens the lives of people who rely on the land for their livelihoods.

Over the past 25 years, salinity intrusion in Bangladesh has increased by about 26 percent, with the affected areas along the coast expanding each year, a study published in 2019 by WaterAid showed.

Khatun and many other local residents face an acute freshwater crisis, even for their essential daily needs such as drinking and cooking. At the same time, food and local sources of income are growing scarcer because of the damage to the farmlands and a lack of water suitable for irrigation.

“We have been buying drinking water for six months,” Romesa Begum, 40, another resident of Boishkhali village, told BenarNews.

She used to collect fresh water for drinking and cooking from the next village a few kilometers away. But nowadays, the villagers there refuse to give her water, saying they need it to irrigate paddy.

“They have asked us to purchase the water. But my husband is a hawker and earns only 300 taka ($3.50) a day. We have to spend it to buy water, rice, and firewood for our survival,” she said.

Around 70 percent of residents in Satkhira depend on water in faraway ponds, according to a survey conducted in 2013 by BRAC, a Bangladeshi NGO, and Jahangirnagar University.

Local women told BenarNews that they have to walk two to five kilometers every day to collect and bring back fresh water for the families’ daily uses.

It’s a common sight in the coastal districts to see women carrying jugs of fresh water as they walk from the nearest well through a brown and bone-dry landscape littered with dead trees. Ironically, the area is not far from the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest.

Climate change will dramatically increase river and groundwater salinity by 2050 in Bangladesh, the World Bank warned in a study published in 2014. It also said that shortages of water for drinking and irrigation would become worse and harm the livelihoods of at least 2.9 million people already struggling with a lack of fresh water.

Fisheries compound problem

Meanwhile, the cascading effects of migration induced by climate change will ultimately affect 13 million people across Bangladesh by 2050, according to a study published last year by Advancing Earth and Space Science, an international non-profit organization.

Bangladesh is especially susceptible to sea-level rise because it is a low-lying country, the report said.

“Most of the capable men go to other districts to work … There is no work in our villages because salinity has killed all the scope for earning here,” Sheikh Abdul Bari, a resident of Gabura village who works at a local brick kiln, told BenarNews.

Those who have stayed work in agriculture or fisheries to earn their living.

Still, the rising levels of salinity in the water supply has also impacted that economic activity, especially because some villagers are resorting to seafood farming.

Muhammad Mahbubur Rahman, 50, from Sora village, said that most of the ponds that local people used for everything from bathing to farming were destroyed after Cyclone Aila in 2008.

“Previously, we cultivated paddy in our lands, but now it is not possible because the water is too salty,” he said.

Muhammad Alimuddin Gazi, a 58-year-old farmer from Joyakhali village, is adversely affected by a relatively new form of fish and shrimp farming, called cage culture. The sea products are grown in mesh enclosures by damming up salt water in the agricultural lands.

“The cage culture is increasing the salinity on the coast. The trees are also dying because of the salinity. The whole area looks like a desert now,” Gazi told BenarNews. “If it is stopped, maybe the trees will revive, and the farming of cattle and goats will be possible again. It would help us with our poverty.”

A study from 2014 said that shrimp aquaculture in the southern coast was causing severe threats to local ecological systems, including “deterioration of soil and water quality ... saline water intrusion in groundwater, local water pollution, and change of local hydrology.”

“Saline water intrusion in the study area has caused colossal negative effects to the local vegetation and particularly to the production of rice and vegetables,” said the study by the Geography and Environment Department at Dhaka University.

It also said that an estimated 41 percent of the country’s population live at elevations under 10 meters (about 32 feet) above sea level in Bangladesh, whose coastline is about 580 km (360 miles) long.

An official in Dhaka said the government was addressing the coastal salinity issue.

“We have become the role model of disaster management because of our capacity to fight it. The salinity intrusion has increased the drinking water crisis in the coastal area. But we are working to address it,” Md Mohsin, secretary at the Department of Disaster Management and Relief, told BenarNews.

Mohsin said the government has projects in place to make salt water drinkable but, he added, it may not be enough to meet the demand.

“We are preparing to undertake some mega-projects to provide necessary fresh water to people hit hard by climate change in the coastal region,” he added.