The unique ecosystem of the Sundarbans is highly vulnerable to climate change. Sandwiched between the freshwater flow of three major rivers from the north and the ever-shifting sea to the south, the mudflats and islands of the Sundarbans are constantly eroding, accumulating and being reshaped. One potential impact of climate change in the region is increased storm intensity. The good news is that the Sundarban mangrove forests serve as a buffer, mitigating storm surges before they reach inland areas. The bad news is the increased risk from typhoons for the four million people living in here.
The entire Sundarban ecosystem is also extremely low-lying, at or within a few meters of sea level. Current climate change projections estimate that a sea level rise of 28 cm above 2000 levels is likely to occur in the next 50-90 years. This would result in a 96% decline in Sundarban tiger habitat, with similarly dire consequences for the area's human inhabitants.
Accurate maps of the Sundarbans island system are hard to find, partially because the landscape is always shifting and maps are not accurate for very long. Another reason for the lack of detailed maps is the government's thought that good maps facilitate poachers, illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and black-market cattle smugglers moving cows across the border from Hindu India to Muslim Bangladesh. This coarse map from the Sajnakhali Wildlife Sanctuary museum is one of the best I've seen.
When asked to identify the biggest environmental threat to the Sundarbans, many of the government and NGO officials in Kolkata and Canning with whom I spoke did not mention climate change. Rather, these experts cite human population density and poverty as much more immediate problems. The Sundarbans is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Over half of the region's historical mangrove forest has been cut down for firewood and other subsistence needs. The remaining forest, both inside and outside of the national park, is regularly exploited for timber, fuel, pulpwood, thatching materials, honey, bees-wax, fish, crustaceans and mollusks.The West Bengal Forest Department is responsible for the preservation of the protected areas. However even this somewhat entrenched bureaucracy recognizes the impossibility of strictly enforcing all the rules. Sundarban subsistence harvesters are extremely poor and lack alternative means of making a living. Before the Sundarban ecosystem can in practice enjoy the full protection that it has on paper, the socioeconomic situation for local people must be greatly improved.
The relationship between local people and the Forest Department has gotten much better in recent years. Twenty years ago, villagers regularly killed wildlife that strayed out of the national park and also illegally entered the park to poach tigers and other animals. Nowadays poaching has been much reduced and villagers will turn straying wildlife over to the Forest Department. In exchange, the Forest Department has done an increasingly good job of involving local people in environmental decision-making through joint forestry management (JFM) programs. The Forest Department has also taken steps to improve socioeconomic conditions in the villages and increase resiliency to climate change by digging wells, planting mangroves along the mud embankments separating agricultural fields from the sea, and promoting economic opportunities.
From the Sajnakhali Wildlife Sanctuary we took a day-long boat cruise through the watery roadways of the Sundarbans. The 3-meter rise and fall of the tide was dramatic as the mudflats at the edge of the forest disappeared and then reappeared as the day wore on. We didn't see the famed Sundarban tiger, but encountered birds galore as well as many chital deer, the tiger's main source of food. Right around camp we ran into the resident mongoose begging for food at the kitchen door, as well as a fat 5-ft water monitor lizard. Small fishing boats plied the water, some sticking to the legal side of the channel and some stealthy drifting through the backwaters, deep into the protected forest. These men risk more than arrest and fines by working in these areas. Sundarban tigers are notoriously predatory towards humans. Small Sundarban fishing boats are typically operated by two people, and stories abound of one man disappearing off the back of the boat with barely a splash, his friend in the prow not noticing his absence until the lull in the conversation becomes awkward.
Sundarban boat safari: looking for wildlife
Local fisherman: legal or illegal?
Who invited the mongoose to dinner?
Chital deer
Red fiddlers
Water monitor
The tiger fence lining the landward side of the protected area. Looks flimsy but is apparently a decent deterrent.
Prime tiger ambush spot. Stripy bodies blend really well with these variegated ferns
Tiger fence close-up. The net is soft, but the tigers don't like the floppy feel of it and generally avoid it.
Sunset view from the watchtower of the Sajnakhali Wildlife Sanctuary
Casts of tiger prints made during the most recent tiger census.
For those of you with a 2009 India Lonely Planet - check out info box on pg. 536. Yeah. this is THAT guy.
One of the two projects on which I'm working with TERI deals with how climate change affects water resource availability in north-central India. The project has multiple components being handled by several partner institutions in India and Europe and includes climate and water modeling, socioeconomic scenario development, field visits and stakeholder consultations. In brief, the idea is to 1) downscale global climate model projections to a more useful regional level, 2) use these regional predictions to model the likely impacts on water resource availability (both in terms of glacial melt and monsoon precipitation patterns, 3) think about how things like population growth, income change, and urbanization over the next 50 years will interact with changing water resource availability, and 4) to go talk to people in a couple of case study sites to better understand the local situation and what climate change may look like in that particular place. Finally, 5) wrap it all up with a bunch of reports/workshops/information-sharing.
All the case study sites for this project are in the Ganges river basin. The Ganges river has a significance in India that is difficult for westerners to understand. It is a holy river in Hinduism, worshiped as the goddess Ganga. Over 400 million people live in the river's catchment area, making it the most heavily populated watershed in the world. Stretching from the Himalaya in northern India through the Gangetic plain to the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges is a critical artery through the subcontinent with massive cultural, biological, and agricultural importance.
From http://dilipkumar.in/india/rivers/ganga_purity.php
The four case study sites were selected to represent a variety of agricultural landscapes within the basin. The district of Udham Singh Nagar in Uttarakhand state is in the upper basin. From the middle basin are the sites of Delhi and Allahabad, in Uttar Pradesh state. And in the lower basin is the town of Kharagpur, near Kolkata in West Bengal state.
In March I attended a community consultation in a village near the Kharagpur case study site. Rousting ourselves early from our guest house at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, we drove for 3 hours to a village in Midnapore West district. Our first meeting with about 10 district-level officials and agricultural scientists was held in the local Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK), an agricultural extension office run by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. The researchers from IIT Kharagpur and TERI explained how we were there to learn from the local experts and to connect on-the-ground fact-finding and human stories with the output of the impersonal computer models. For the next hour, the researchers lead the workshop participants through a discussion of what environmental problems were impacting agriculture in the area and what some possible solutions might be.
Overall, the participants were fairly pessimistic. The discussion focused on the increasing cost of cultivation due to both labor shortages and small land holdings. Poor farm laborers are migrating to the city in search of better jobs, leaving insufficient manpower to cultivate even the small plots of land held by most families. Efficiencies of scale through mechanization are impossible due to the high cost of equipment and the small farm size. The area is highly water-stressed - the water table has been over-exploited and the local characteristics of the soil make recharge a very slow process. Rainwater harvesting has been going on in the area since 2005, but the structures are very expensive to build. Increasing temperature and decreasing humidity have negativity affected the cultivation of fodder grasses for livestock, impacting the health of cattle.
The participants were also very pessimistic about the ability of the government to help them. They also questioned the value of our visit. Over the years, many NGOs and researchers have come to ask about their problems. But then off they go to publish their papers, never to return with assistance or information. I felt very self-conscious during this discussion - a large white lady expressing intellectualcuriosity but with very little understanding of the problems these people face every day. Although none of these problems can be firmly attributed to climate change, these issues are vulnerabilities that decrease the resiliency of the area to the eventual inevitable climate change impacts.
The Krishi Vigyan Kendra office
IIT Kharagpur researchers consulting with the district-level officials
The district level meeting concluded with lunch - dal, rice, and vegetable stew delivered from the kitchen in massive buckets. We all sat at long tables, shoveling up the sticky mixture with our fingers and depositing it in our mouths with the minimum of mess. Eating rice and gravy with your fingers is very much an acquired skill, and more of my rice may have ended up on my face and the table than in my mouth. I asked one of the Indian researchers why people ate with their fingers when spoons, which are not exactly advanced technology, are not hard to come by. "When you eat with your hands, you enjoy your food more" was the answer. "The feel of the rice in your fingers enhances the experience, and allows you to eat with an additional sense, the sense of touch".
After lunch, it was time to consult with the farmers themselves. The KVK officials had recruited about 20 farmers to come and share their experiences with us. Their comments were much the same as the district level officials. They told of increased problems with elephants raiding their crops and of high-energy rain events that it was impossible to store and that just ran off straight into the ocean. Rice seeds had failed to germinate in recent years due to high temperatures. Overuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides had killed all the earthworms, causing a decline in vermiculture.
The farmers were much more enthusiastic about the session than the district level officials had been. They seemed ecstatic to have such a strange group of people interested in hearing about their problems. We tried to communicate clearly that we didn't have anything to give them, that we were just here to learn. They accepted this, and were still excited to share their story.
Last activity of the day: to visit the village. One farmer guided our research group through a sal forest plantation to his family's fields. And there it was, iron-age agriculture. Buffalo-driven plows and hand-picked potatoes. And in the village, mud huts with equal proportions of wide-eyed children and goats peering out of them. More than half of India's 1.2 billion people live in rural villages such as this. This is the real India, and seeing it first hand, far removed from the tourist sites most visitors to India experience, was uniquely special.
Disclaimer: Before I inadvertently give the impression that my Hindi is amazing, I should reveal that due to the mixed language abilities of our group, simultaneous translation of most comments occured in Hindi, Bangla, English and Dutch. Fortunately for me, I can speak at least one of these languages fluently.
