Green darkness

Tulsi Khara has lived all her 70 years on Ghodamara island in the world8217;s largest delta. But now steadily rising water levels have engulfed most of the two hectares of land she used to own. Furious for having lost her livelihood, she says: 8216;8216;Of course I8217;m angry with the river. It has taken everything! But how can I fight it? How can I beat the Ganges? All our belongings and cattle were swept away by cyclones. Overnight we became paupers.8217;8217;

Apart from the erratic weather patterns, soil erosion is a constant problem. Islanders are losing large tracts of land as huge waves lash the coast. 8216;8216;I have never seen such massive landslides. Even without storms, huge chunks of land sink along with the trees,8217;8217; says an exasperated Parul Biswas whose hut is just a few inches away from imminent inundation.

The water is gulping the land at an alarming rate, further shrinking land area. Inundation and saline-water incursion are rendering the land unfit and unproductive for cultivation. People inhabiting the lower areas have to constantly search and move to higher grounds to survive. Confused and desperate, villagers narrate tales of destruction. They haven8217;t witnessed such rapid climatic changes before.

Shitanath Sarkar, a frail 70-year-old farmer with a vacant look in his eyes and 10 mouths to feed, bears testimony to the worsening situation on the island. Holding a walking stick, Sarkar stands on the mud-embankment, the only safeguard villagers have against the forces of nature, and points to a large area of cultivable land now gone down under the waters. 8216;8216;The Sundarbans are my home. I8217;ve lived here since I was a child. Now I8217;m 65 and things have gone from bad to worse. Inch by inch, my single hectare of land gradually disappeared in front of my eyes. When cyclones come ashore we are flooded for days on end, suspended between life and death. Embankments provide no security8212;they just buy an extra few hours. We are caught in nature8217;s fury and can easily drown. We are bearing the brunt of nature. Seawater floods villages and the salt destroys crops. Our cows, goats and foodstocks get washed away during storms. If we lose our land, we die.8217;8217;

Spread over North and South 24 Pargana districts of the state of West Bengal, the Sundarban islands are a unique World Heritage Site, a biosphere reserve and a national park, teeming with many rare species of flora and fauna; an ecological marvel, now under threat due to climatic changes accelerated due to human activities and greenhouse gas emissions.

According to scientists, the Earth8217;s average temperature has increased by approximately 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past century. There is strong evidence to prove that global warming is largely due to human emissions of greenhouse gases from a growing fossil-fuel economy. The warming has already been sufficient to induce significant changes in ecosystems and wildlife.

Professor Sugato Hazra, Department of Oceanographic Studies, Jadavpur University, has done extensive survey and study in the region. According to him, 8216;8216;Sea-surface temperature is increasing at .019 degree centigrade per year. The relative sea level is rising at 3.14 mm per year, which is more than the global average. Indications like salination of estuaries and the soil, loss of biodiversity are all indicative of a stressed ecosystem.8217;8217; Sea-facing islands like Sagar, Jambudweep, Mulchari, Ghodamara are the most vulnerable, because they are getting eroded faster than the other islands. This is the combined impact of climate change and unplanned human intervention in a very fragile ecosystem.8217;8217;

He has some dire predictions for the islanders. 8216;8216;There is a definite positive correlation, with 90 per cent confidence factor, that the rate of erosion and attrition of the islands is controlled by the rate in change of relative sea level. Based on different studies and data, we are seeing that rising sea levels would mean islands are going to lose more and more land, and by 2020, the islands would lose up to 20 per cent of the land area,8217;8217; he says.

Apprehensions about what is happening are gradually being confirmed. The effects of climate change are visible in the plant and animal kingdom, but the quantification of the effect is yet to be ascertained. Dr Abhijit Mitra, who teaches at the Department of Marine Science, Calcutta University, along with his team of scientists, has chalked out some of the indicators pointing towards global warming and overall changes occurring in the habitat.

Dr Mitra says: 8216;8216;In phytoplankton community we have found that 29 species, exclusively of marine origin, have entered the Sundarbans8212;indicating that salinity has increased a lot leading to loss of important phyotoplankton species like Mucuna burmanica and horse shoe crab.8217;8217;

The writer is with WWF India