Abstract
While there is little dissent in the scientific community that climate change directly correlates to human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, action to reduce those emissions has not followed from the United States and many other governments around the world. Meanwhile, climate changes are already underway, and will continue to some degree even if emissions are drastically curtailed, thanks to emissions already in the atmosphere. Some countries and states are making their own plans to adapt to expected impacts including higher sea levels, more intense rainfall, droughts, heat waves, and loss of water supplies—and to reduce their local emissions. In this Global Forum, three experts highlight efforts by national and local governments in planning for 2100 and beyond. From the Netherlands, Arthur Mynett (2011); from Bangladesh, Saleemul Huq; and from California, Martha Krebs (2011). Over the months of January and February, this forum will continue at www.thebulletin.org.
In 2009, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report that identified the mega deltas in Asia as being among the most vulnerable places on the planet to the impacts of human-induced climate change. Bangladesh, located on the world’s largest delta at the downstream of the world’s second largest river system—the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna—is one of the most vulnerable. And the risks it faces are exacerbated by the country’s large population: 150 million people squeezed into an area less than 58,000 square miles, roughly the size of the state of Iowa. Nearly 50 percent of Bangladeshis live below the poverty line.
The impacts will be vast. By 2050, 70 million people in the country could be affected annually by floods, and 8 million by drought, according to the IPCC. Both international and the nation’s experts agree that the country will also be affected by more intense cyclones, increased salinization, and eventual inundation of the extensive low-lying coast due to sea level rise and even increased droughts in certain parts of the country. Further, the IPCC estimates that 8 percent of the low-lying areas will be permanently inundated by 2050.
Bangladesh has been called “nature’s laboratory for disaster,” but it is also providing a blueprint for adapting to climate change. In 2009, the government launched the Bangladesh Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan (BCCSAP), which presents tactical actions to combat climate change. This strategy could be used in other low-lying deltas in countries such as Egypt or Vietnam, or even in cities like New Orleans.
Climate change strategy: Adaptation
In the 1990s, Bangladeshi scientists were among the first in the developing world to study the potential impacts of climate change. It was at that time that the United Nations supported Bangladesh—one of 50 least developed countries (LDCs)—to carry out national adaptation programs of action (NAPAs). These NAPAs were meant to identify the most important impacts of climate change and the most vulnerable sectors and areas in each country and then prioritize the most urgent and immediate adaptation actions. Bangladesh completed this, but went on to develop the BCCSAP, which is much more strategic and longer-term than the NAPA.
In 2009, the Bangladeshi government allocated $100 million toward the implementation of the BCCSAP over the next 10 years. With the help of other countries’ economic support, the action plan will allow the country to respond to climate change impacts for up to 25 years. This will cost some $5 billion for the first five years. So far the European Commission, as well as a number of developed countries including the UK, Sweden, and Denmark have pledged over $100 million toward a multi-donor trust fund to support the implementation of the BCCSAP. Thus Bangladesh, being one of the poorest and most vulnerable of the developing countries, took a leading role in responding to climate change through adaptation by largely relying on its own scientific capacities. For the first time, a developing country took the lead on national climate action with coordinated support from other countries, presenting a new paradigm.
The action plan focused on six issues:
Food security, social protection, and health
For Bangladesh, the most vital concern is that of its vulnerable population, including women and children, and their food security, protection, and health needs. In order to manage these issues, the action plan is to develop community-level adaptation programs, diversify occupations, and develop climate-resilient crops, such as varieties of rice that are resistant to floods, salinity, and drought. Water is certainly an important issue, and not overlooked in the action plan, which aims to ensure that this population has access to safe drinking water in the coastal areas that are prone to salinization or drought. The action plan also sets out to improve access to basic health and educational services, as well as social protection, such as insurance policies, for this population.
Comprehensive disaster management
Bangladesh is prone to repeated river floods and coastal cyclones, which, over past decades, have killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people and devastated the economy. Two particularly devastating cyclones were in 1970, which killed some 500,000 people, and in 1991, which caused more than 125,000 deaths and left nearly 10 million people homeless. Most of these deaths were caused because the general population was not properly informed of weather conditions and did not have access to proper shelters. Over the past 10 years, Bangladesh has developed a comprehensive disaster management program, which successfully disseminates early warnings on impending disasters to the population. This has given people time to travel to newly-built cyclone shelters, which saved millions of lives in the last few cyclones that hit the country.
The action plan will take these improvements one step further. Future adaptation to climatic impacts will be connected to the current disaster management efforts in order to enhance the longer-term nature of preparedness from the community level to the national level. The system will also be strengthened, so that forecasts—both short- and long-term—are more reliable.
Infrastructure development
Repeated floods and cyclones have caused enormous damage to the country’s roads and embankments, as well as other infrastructure. Each time a natural disaster strikes, it takes years before the infrastructure is rebuilt, hurting livelihoods and the economy. In its action plan, Bangladesh set out to identify ways in which reconstruction efforts take into consideration the future impacts from climate change, along with urbanization patterns and economic development. Such planning and construction of new designs—as well as repairs of existing infrastructure—is likely to be the most expensive of all the action plans.
Research and knowledge management
Climate change impacts are not well known, and the level of uncertainty of the science is relatively high. Therefore, it is necessary to update the impact of climate change as various global climate change models are applied to the country. This will require well coordinated research and monitoring across scientific disciplines from natural to social and other sciences. The country has already begun to establish a network of centers to ensure that international researchers can share the latest ideas and technologies with researchers in Bangladesh and vice versa. Such research will contribute to understanding how climate change might shape hydrological scenarios, thereby influencing future designs for things like flood protection embankments. The action plan also moves to push research to connect climate change, poverty, and health, as well as climate change, poverty, and vulnerability to identify when the poor population is most vulnerable to climate change.
Mitigation and low-carbon development
Bangladesh has chosen adaptation as its main approach to the adverse impacts of climate change, but it also aims to reduce its already-low greenhouse-gas emissions. Through its action plan, the country will implement strategies to expand its forestry program throughout the country, as well as to explore new energy technologies from developed countries.
Capacity building and institutional strengthening
As the problem of climate change is a relatively new one, dealing with it—both through mitigation as well as adaptation—will require a willingness to learn from both the government and the civil society. Thus the action plan highlights the need for capacity building and training, for example, so that the country’s ministries and agencies can design effective policies that are adapted to consider climate change effects. Further, this action plan strives to position the country’s government in a leadership role internationally on matters related to climate change.
Strategies and leadership
In the two years since the BCCSAP was approved by the government, various state agencies and non-government organizations have received funding to implement different elements of the action plan. These projects include new infrastructure plans to safeguard the country from flooding, expanded forestry projects in the coastal areas to protect the country from cyclones, and innovative agriculture research projects to improve flood- and saline-resistant varieties of rice, one of which has already been developed. The action plan has also established greater capacity building across government agencies, as well as supported coordinated research among the nation’s scientific community with that of the global scientific community.
Bangladesh has proven itself to be a leader in taking the climate change problem seriously and developing its own long-term strategy to combat and adapt to climate change—while at the same time putting a significant part of its own meager financial resources into implementing the strategy. Representatives from Nepal, Kenya, and the Netherlands have visited Bangladesh to learn from its experience. Such proactive national planning and implementation can be a model not just for other developing countries, but even for the developed countries that also will be affected by the adverse impacts of human-induced climate change in the future.
Footnotes
Author biography