Sidr sends a grim signal from Mother Earth

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Nirmal Ghosh, Straits Times 23 Nov 07

IN BANGKOK - BELIEVE it or not, Bangladesh was lucky this time, says Dr Ainun Nishat.

It may be a strange thing to say, given the destruction that Cyclone Sidr visited on the country last weekend.

In outlying islands, howling 240kmh winds blew houses and trees away like matchsticks. Most of the people who died were killed by collapsing houses and trees. A storm surge brought sea water rushing inland, swamping fields and freshwater sources.

The result: Ruined livelihoods, ruined land, shattered families and an international aid effort under way to reach scattered communities marooned without shelter, clothes, food and fresh water.

But Dr Nishat, a climate change expert and Bangladesh's representative in the World Conservation Union (IUCN), figures things would have been much worse if the storm had coincided with the high tide.

That the cyclone happened was not unusual. Cyclone season in the Bay of Bengal occurs roughly between March 15 and May 15, and between Oct 15 and Dec 15, each year.

But in key respects Cyclone Sidr was unusual: Its size and behaviour, for one thing.

The depression covered the whole of Bangladesh, which has never happened before. The unusually high winds and heavy rain covered almost the entire country. Even in Dhaka, the wind speed hit 150kmh.

The grim lesson of Cyclone Sidr underlined the potential of global warming-driven events to wipe out growth and development.

A report released this week by a group of leading development agencies in Britain said many Asian countries risk a reversal of economic growth from the effects of climate change.

'The human drama of climate change will largely be played out in Asia, where almost two-thirds of the world's population live, effectively on the front line of climate change,' said the report, titled Up In Smoke: Asia And The Pacific.

That the cyclone's size and energy were clearly related to global warming is beyond doubt, says Dr Nishat.

He told The Straits Times over the phone from Dhaka: 'This year, we have had rough seas virtually all year.

'This has already seriously affected the livelihood of fishermen, and a few thousand - nobody knows exactly how many - have already died in rough seas because they ignored warnings, or the warnings came when they were already out at sea.'

He added that temperatures on the surface of the sea up to a certain depth have risen; shrimp farmers have reported finding mother shrimp further inland and have had to apply for government permission to trawl further inland.

He said: 'The almost continually rough sea is definitely global warming-related. With rising sea temperature, a depression will immediately gather more energy.'

Bangladesh's dykes, built to protect some of its coast, are between 3m and 5m high.

Last weekend's storm surge reached around 2.5m. If the cyclone had coincided with the high tide, the surge would have been too much for the dykes.

So Bangladesh was lucky - not just because of the early warning and the dykes.

Whether it and other vulnerable countries will continue being this lucky in the future is in grave doubt.

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Escap) said in a study - ahead of the cyclone and a regional meeting last weekend in Bangkok on climate change - that as of last year, the Asia-Pacific region accounted for 74 per cent of over 21,000 casualties from natural disasters worldwide.

Coastal areas, especially the densely populated mega-delta regions in South, East and South-east Asia, will be at greatest risk of global warming-driven phenomena, owing to increased flooding from the sea and, in some mega-deltas, flooding from rivers, the study warned.

The Up In Smoke report cited Vietnam as an example of a country which would experience some of the worst impacts of a rise in sea level, a process which is already under way.

A 1m sea-level rise would trigger losses totalling US$17 billion (S$24.6 billion) a year, with Vietnam losing more than 12 per cent of its most fertile land, the report said.

Across the low-lying Mekong delta, some 14 million people could be displaced.

Experts believe that Bangladesh will lose around 15 per cent of its land area to the sea.

Cyclone Sidr was only the first of many extreme weather episodes which will push that process.

It proved the point of the Up In Smoke report.

Mr Junaid Kamal Ahmad, the sector manager for social development at the World Bank in Washington notes that Bangladesh has had 5 per cent growth in gross domestic product over the last decade, and has cut poverty by 9 per cent; and several 'Millennium Development Goals', such as gender equality in education, for instance, will be reached by 2015.

The country's ability to respond to crises and emergencies has also vastly improved, he told The Straits Times.

Still, Sidr was a shock to the system.

'It hits the system on several layers of vulnerability, from the macro-economic effects like the destruction of the winter rice crop and the loss of livelihood for fishermen and shrimp farms, to the destruction of infrastructure.'

If the country is unable to deal with repeated episodes driven by global warming, 'a couple of decades worth of growth and progress can be pushed aside', he said.