By Hosna J. Shewly, Md. Nadiruzzaman and Jeroen Warner
Floods, droughts, cyclones - these days, every time we experience a disaster, it is framed as a climate event, and climate labelling dominates coverage in all knowledge communication portals. Large swathes of state water managers and popular media have developed a dominant discourse of blaming climate change for everything, which Hulme (2011) defines as 'climate reductionism'. For example, in Bangladesh, a country that remains at the top of the list in global climate risk indexes and disaster rankings, reflecting on the dangers of climate change and disaster attribution is urgent – especially when they mask pre-existing fragilities and inequalities on the ground.
Without detracting from climate change risks in any way, a simplified climate story is misleading and deflects attention from many remediable root causes. The politics of framing holds climate change responsible for every negative event while obscuring human responsibilities and the need for reducing vulnerability. This applies with a vengeance to salinity intrusion on the southwestern coast of Bangladesh, the most popular climate case in any knowledge portal. This piece aims to debunk the 'climate victimhood' narrative.
About 63 million of the country's roughly 170 million people live in the coastal region, and most are at risk of salinity intruding into their land and water sources (Neumann et al., 2015; Mostafa et al., 2019). Salinity intrusion in Bangladesh began in the 1960s when engineer-led polderisation was introduced in coastal areas to protect the area from floods and cyclones. However, these were later found to be a reason for land subsidence and degradation (Paprocki & Huq, 2017). Further, upstream water withdrawal by India by building barrages at Farakka and implementing irrigation projects reduced downstream flows in dry seasons and triggered salinity intrusion in the coastal region (Mirza, 1998), affecting not only aquatic life but also livelihoods dependent on that aquatic life (Mostafa et al., 2019: 291). Due to salinity, traditional crops failed and were gradually replaced by shrimp farming. The transformation of agricultural land into shrimp culture brought profits for the landowners but affected the community because of reduced employment opportunities. High revenue from shrimp farming lured people with significant capital from outside to invest, creating a sharp rise in landlessness, displacement, and unemployment (Khan et al., 2021).
The discourse on the roots of increased salinity on the southern coast of Bangladesh has recently shifted towards climate change (see Mahmud, 1993; Vidal, 2003; Ahmed, 2022). Domestic and international media, development agencies, and popular discourses now highlight salinity intrusion and its myriad impacts as palpable evidence of climate change (for a critique, see Mostafa et al, 2019).
In reality, increasing salinity has resulted from successive changes in water management, large-scale engineering structures, land use, drainage, irrigation, land administration, and so on. Climate change has complicated and multiplied all associated risks but is not the root cause. The populist narrative of the epistemic community not only bypasses these complexities but also generalises the problem of salinity. For example, data from river salinity are often used to explain the magnitude of the problem, while the river salinity, soil salinity and groundwater salinity in the same geographic space may be significantly different, as is their salinisation process. For example, Mirza (1998) shows how the implementation of the Farakka Barrage spiked the river salinity in the southwest over a few years. This was further worsened by the coastal embankment project (Dewan, 2021). However, the soil salinity synchronised with the river salinity where shrimp farming intensified (Mostafa et al., 2019; Paprocki and Huq, 2017), as they breached the embankments and let the saltwater in. Over time, the embankments became so porous that they failed to withstand a weak cyclone like Aila in 2009, which inundated a large amount of land for some years and further increased soil salinity in those devastated areas immensely. Such an increase in soil salinity hugely impacted the harvest of traditional crops in those lands. However, neither river salinity nor soil salinity has much to do with groundwater salinity which is one of the major sources of drinking water. Rather, over-extraction of groundwater for irrigation allowed salt water to seep further inland. Recall in this context that Bangladesh is a floodplain, home to approximately 170 million inhabitants with rice, a highly irrigation-intensive crop, as their main staple food.
Despite this complex chain of causalities, salinity has become overwhelmingly a synonym for climate change in Bangladesh. Yet there is no rigorous scientific evidence to support this view. The ways climate change could have a direct impact on river salinity is through (1) sea level rise, (2) coastal flooding by super cyclones, (3) climate change-induced weather variabilities in the upper basin that reduce the river flow, or (4) breach of embankments and inundation triggered by heavy rainfall.
Countries claiming to be vulnerable to climate change use the IPCC as a proxy instead of showcasing their scientific evidence of climate change impacts (Nadiruzzaman et al., 2022) and without even enquiring about other potential factors. This approach is highly problematic as it fails to appreciate the multiplicity and complexity of the problem. A holistic understanding investigates the historical accounts of climatic and non-climatic changes to critically reflect on the dominant causal strings. It also complicates finding a typical villain to whom all blame could be transferred. Such misleading and false premises can confuse the public and develop a false sense of vulnerability that little can be done locally to reduce the damage that natural hazards cause. Reflecting on the dangers of climate change and disaster attribution trends, a simplified climate story deflects attention from many remediable causes.
These examples underscore the importance of asking in-depth questions to understand the broader spectrum of different interfaces. A catastrophe only follows when vulnerable people are at risk (Kelman, 2022). Climate-centric disaster framing can contradict the experiences of those who suffer disasters because it erases from view—and, thus, from policy agendas—the socio-economic and political factors that actually cause their vulnerability and suffering. In addition, fatalism and depoliticisation already exist in people's minds (Zaman, 2021), and climate reductionism adds a layer to that by diverting local accountability to God. It not only masks a multitude of development and planning failures and maladaptive policies and practices that have created vulnerability to droughts or floods but also offers leverage to the politicians to get away with inaction or misguided actions.
Dr. Hosna Shewly is a senior researcher at the Fulda University of Applied Sciences, Germany. Her research interest lies in three interconnected areas- environmental governance, inequality, and activism in the global South.
Dr. Nadiruzzaman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health, Ethics and Society and Head of Research of the Sustainable 2030 initiative at Maastricht University, Netherlands. His interests are in climate change adaptation, environmental governance and health. Nadir obtained an MA (by research) and a PhD in Human Geography from Durham University, UK.
Dr. Jeroen Warner is a Senior Associate Professor of Crisis and Disaster Studies at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. Jeroen teaches, trains and publishes on domestic and transboundary water conflict, participatory resource management, and governance issues.
References
Ahmed, K. 2022. 'We live and die by it': climate crisis threatens Bangladesh's Sundarbans. The Guardian, January 18, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jan/18/live-and-die-by-bangladesh-sundarbans-mangrove-forest-climate-crisis-threat-resources-cyclones
Dewan, C. 2021. Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate change, development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. Washington, USA: University of Washington Press. https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/50931
Hulme, M. 2011. Reducing the future to climate: A story of climate determinism and reductionism. Osiris 26 (1): 245-66. https://doi.org/10.1086/661274
Kelman, I. 2022. Pakistan's floods are a disaster – but they didn't have to be. The Conversation, 20 September. https://theconversation.com/pakistans-floods-are-a-disaster-but-they-didnt-have-to-be-190027
Khan, M.A.; Begum, R.; Nielsen, R. and Hoff, A. 2021. Production risk, technical efficiency, and input use nexus: lessons from Bangladesh aquaculture. Journal of the World Aquaculture Society 52: 57–72. http://doi.org/10.1111/jwas.12767
Mahmud, A. 1993. Dam dispute Spells man-made drought for Bangladeshis, The Guardian, December 06, 1993.
Mirza, M. 1998. Diversion of the Ganges water at Farakka and Its effects on salinity in Bangladesh. Environmental Management 22: 711–722. https://doi.org/10.1007/s002679900141
Mostafa, M.; Nasir, N.; Rahman, M.F. and Huq, S. 2019. The Delta in peril. American Scientist 107 (5): 288-295. https://doi.org/10.1511/2019.107.5.288
Nadiruzzaman, M.; Scheffran, J.; Shewly, H.J. and Kley, S. 2022. Conflict-sensitive climate change adaptation: A review. Sustainability 14 (13): 8060. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14138060
Neumann B.; Vafeidis, A.T.; Zimmermann, J.; Nicholls, R.J. 2015. Future coastal population growth and exposure to sea-level rise and coastal flooding - A global assessment. PLoS ONE 10 (3): e0118571. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0118571.
Paprocki, K. and Huq, S. 2017. Shrimp and coastal adaptation: On the politics of climate justice. Climate and Development 10(1): 1–3. http://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2017.130187
Vidal, J. 2003. Troubled waters for Bangladesh as India presses on with plan to divert major rivers. The Guardian, July 24. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/jul/24/water.india
Zaman, F. 2021. The role of popular discourse about climate change in disaster preparedness: A critical discourse analysis. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 60: 102270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2021.102270
Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/24354425@N03/32442867063