How Bangladesh can avert the crisis?
After the US President George Bush had refused to sign the “biodiversity” treaty in 1992, the last effort to save the planet from environmental disasters seemed to be on the verge of failure . For the affluent countries like the U.S. the chickens have come home to roost. The U.S. in the last one decade suffered several weather related catastrophes like severe flooding, hurricanes and prolonged hot summer days in some states. After Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005 and flooded the city for days, Hurricane Gustav with a surge as high as 14 ft accompanied by torrential rain is speeded up to hit Louisiana forcing two million people to flee to safety the other day.
Bangladesh now feels the full brunt of impact for human actions far away from the borders of the country. While speaking as a chief guest at the International Symposium on Climate Change and Food Security at Dhaka on August 30 last, Chief Adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed laid bare the severe problem Bangladesh has been facing for the last two decades because of climate change brought upon mostly by human induced activities in the industrialized countries of the West. Iceland President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson now in Dhaka to address the Symposium issued a call for actions at national, regional and global levels to face the impacts of Climate Change that poses threat to food security and livelihoods of millions of people in Bangladesh alone.
The UN sponsored IPCC panel composed of 1500 leading climate experts cautioned the leaders of the world as early as in 1995 that unless the world had taken immediate and drastic steps to reduce the emissions of heat trapping gases, the green house effect, as they preferred to call it at that time could drive global temperatures as much as 4 degree Centigrade up by the year 2100. The disasters they predicted at that time, have come true. The IPCC prediction in 1995 about climate change triggering increase in temperature, decrease in the availability of fresh water, drought in some areas and flooding in other areas, sea level rise due to glacial melting accompanied by cyclones and hurricanes too often ravaging the coastal areas of Bangladesh, India, the U.S. and the Caribbean islands are experiences now. And Bangladesh, a low lying mega delta comprising three large river systems with consequent heavy rainfall and annual flooding is perhaps the worst victim of global warming.
Most ominously, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers and huge sediments carried by the rivers coupled with restricted drainage has affected food production causing food in security for at least 30 million people in the country.
In the symposium some proposals were adopted that emphasized the need for stimulating multi-disciplinary research on such burning issue and identifying effective mitigation and adaptation options, including carbon sequestration in different ecosystems. Believably these strategies are no different from what were recommended earlier like switching from coal and oil to natural gas, turning to nuclear and solar energy, altering land-use, curbing automobile use, changing life styles and employment patterns.
Much to our comfort, visiting Iceland President Grimsson suggested the creation of a Himalaya Council modeled after the Arctic council for countries surrounding the Himalayas, including Bangladesh, Nepal and India to conduct research and cooperate on combating the accelerating effects of climate change in this region. Taking note of Iceland President's warning that environmental challenges such as water shortages and soil erosion might spawn the seeds of future conflict, Bangladesh could possibly tap its abundant water resources, preserve it through adoption of scientific means to augment food production. The grim warning that came from Grimsson was that global warming is now several decades ahead of schedule because the melting of ice-sheets in the Arctic and Greenland region, projected to occur in the middle of this century, has already begun.
As Grimsson said, 'Iceland could possibly serve as an inspiration for switching to clean energy resources, with 100 per cent of the country's electricity now produced by clean energy sources compared to 80 per cent of it produced from coal and oil half a century ago. In Bangladesh context, in our search for clean energy, solar power features prominently and the visions of 1970s can be realized if manufacturers could find a way to produce silicon-based photovoltaic cells more efficiently and thus drive down their high cost. On the other hand because a given solar cell is sensitive to just a few colours of the many that make up sun light, researchers are working on multi-layered cells, which will trap most of the colours of the rainbow.
In an effort to translate those policies into action, people in the developed world have to completely transform their societies, and rich countries like the US would have to subsidize poor but developing nations like Bangladesh, now the worst victim of global warming. That means governments in the developing countries should shift more of their spending on energy research to renewable source of energy. Ironically true, in the US research on renewable sources has climbed up from $784m to $878m in a year but research on nuclear power swallows $5b a year. Nuclear power gives off no greenhouse gases, yet few apart from bosses of nuclear power firmsbelieve that building more nuclear plants will ever be a politically plausible solution. Rightly or wrongly people are more frightened of nuclear accidents than of hot weather.
The environmental problems at the present moment are very complex because they are caused by substances that are necessary to fuel the economies of the industrialized nations. Cleaning up a polluted river like the Buriganga or Shitalakhya or a waste dump at Matuail in the city is often a mammoth task. But it requires that a community decide it is worth the cost and effort. Stemming the disaster in any part of the world these days will require a national and international effort. At such a point of regional calamity, cooperation, as Grimsson and Chief Adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed have emphasized, is called for more urgently than ever before and the sharing of knowledge, expertise and experience is absolutely necessary.
Undeniably true, the greatest challenge that Bangladesh faces today , as Chief Adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed has said in the symposium, is lifting some 50 million people out of poverty, a challenge made all the more difficult for Bangladesh because global warming has started to affect food production causing an increase in food deficit for the last one decade.
The greenhouse effect is expected to bring out more changes more quickly than any other climatic event in the earth's history. Scientists state that the changes cannot be stopped, though they can be slowed, ostensibly through conservation. But the time is short. Says Robert Dickinson, a senior scientist at the National Centre for atmospheric research, “We don't have 100 years. We have 10 or 20 at most.”
For such a complex problem the basic facts seem widely accepted. The rich and developed countries are adding a net 3 billion tons a year of carbon to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide, plus methane chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other harmful trace gases. And trees are the carbon dumps : trees extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, emit the oxygen and store the carbon in their wood. We must preserve the forests that still stand and restore those that have been destroyed.
Each year 28 million acres of tropical forests are cleared , producing one-quarter of the carbon dioxide burden through combustion, erasing species of plants, and animals, and allowing rains to sweep across smooth ground into floods like that in Bangladesh. Trees, the lungs of the planet are being cut 30 times as fast as they are being replaced. The U.S. should encourage a scheme, to be administered by the U.N. in which the foreign debt of Third World countries would be swapped for tropical forests as well as planting trees in Bangladesh, India and Nepal region.
It is no surprise that trees and forest lands are being destroyed. Most human beings who live in and around them are poor, and their population growth continues. To preserve an environment, whether it be wetland or forest, there must be an acceptable and rising level of economic wellbeing for the humans who live in and around it. Environmentalism requires restraint. Poor people in Bangladesh who lack enough food to eat or enough fuel to burn lack restraint as well.
So economic progress or sustainable development in countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Indonesia and the Philippines may no longer be an option we can postpone. The masses here have risen with axes and chain saws. Quietly, persistently, they are slowly destroying the earth's carbon installations.
In the present context, however much Bangladeshi leaders or environmentalists pin hope to avert the crisis, the situation is least likely to change for the better unless the US takes a bold initiative to curtail its production of greenhouse gas. With only 4 per cent of the world's population, America produces 25 per cent of its greenhouse gases.
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