Water in Bangladesh: Rainfall and Conservation Efforts for the Prevention of Climate Change and its Impact on Landscapes and Landscaping

Climate change also exerts pressure on the country’s water supply. The likelihood of extreme rains is now more likely. For example, in June, a massive flood killed at least 22 people in Bangladesh and stranded another 4 million. However, satellite data show that annual rainfall rates in Bangladesh have fallen by about 10% over the past two decades, or by 10 millimetres per year (see ‘Water in Bangladesh: Rainfall’). This worrying decline has been noted in the literature5,6 since the early 1950s.

The water in Gagre’s used to run out in January or February before the rains came, so these steps are important. For me, it was fascinating to see and learn about. I wouldn’t even have minded getting drenched.

Those efforts include altering landscapes by digging trenches on slopes and planting more trees to slow runoff so that more water percolates into the ground. But they also include educational efforts like teaching villagers how to develop a water budget for the year, how to monitor groundwater and how to change crops and planting methods to use less water.

The Impact of Fashion Week on Climate Change and Water Levels in the World: A Primer on the Status of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography Mission

Coming up next Thursday: Vanessa Friedman, chief fashion critic at The New York Times, explores the environmental impact of Fashion Week. Can it ever be truly sustainable? You can register to watch for free.

Other ways that Bangladesh could reduce its water strain from agriculture include: developing better rainwater harvesting systems, restricting rice production in groundwater-vulnerable areas and switching to crops that consume less water than rice does, such as wheat and legumes.

Satellite data can be used to fill gaps. Satellites, such as the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) follow-on and the Global Precipitation Measurement network make data freely available. The picture is soon to improve. In December, NASA and CNES, France’s space agency, plan to launch the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission. In order to give more detailed monitoring of water levels than is possible today, SWOT will provide unprecedented information on global ocean and inland surface waters at fine spatial resolution. The international scientific community has been working hard over the past 15 years to get ready to store, process and use SWOT data.

NASA Earth Information System: Monitoring and Forecasting of Bangladesh’s Water Supply and Flows Using the Mekong River Commission and Other Transboundary Agreements

Bangladesh is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world — its total gross domestic product has increased almost eight-fold since 2000. Agriculture has been promoted by the government in order to improve food security. This has motivated farmers to cultivate rice not just during the wet monsoon season from June to October, but also during the dry season. Rice productivity has doubled since 1990. Bangladesh now produces almost five times as much rice perhectare as India and Thailand, even though Bangladesh’s yield perhectare is over three times that of other leading rice producers.

In partnership with local authorities, the World Bank has helped Bangladesh by adding thousands of cyclone shelters, water control structures, and hundreds of polders. More than 325,000 people are protected from tidal flooding and storm surge. More investments are needed to protect against the increasing risks posed by climate change.

All of these efforts need to have good data in order to understand water supplies, flows and forecasts so that they can be built in the right places.

Bilateral scientific collaboration between Bangladesh and water-sharing nations, including India, Nepal, Bhutan and China, would be mutually beneficial. The decades-long Mekong River Commission between Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam is one successful transboundary agreement that could serve as a model.

NASA’s Earth Information System can help by supporting the development of tailored data-analysis and modelling tools. This framework allowed us to acquire the data we present here. We are currently working on an advanced hydrological model that will be capable of representing climate-change effects and human impacts on Bangladesh’s water availability. We expect that the co-development of such a modelling system with local partners will support decision-making.

SERVIR, a joint programme of NASA and the US Agency for International Development that focuses on capacity-building, could also help improve forecasting of severe weather for Bangladesh, for example. This could improve the flood monitoring and forecast system operated by the Bangladesh Water Development Board, which is limited in geographical scope — flooding is monitored only at specific locations, not across the country. Such efforts will help with short-term adaptation and emergency responses to flood conditions, and with long-term planning for infrastructure.

A prototype system to use such estimates to avoid overwatering has been developed for northeastern Bangladesh, with plans to expand it to the northwest of the country and to incorporate the system into Bangladesh’s Agro-Meteorological Information System, run by the Department of Agricultural Extension.

These irrigation advisory systems could be improved further by increasing the spatial resolutions of input data — some of which currently come from coarse-resolution global forecast models — and doing further validation on the ground.

Another strategy is to adapt to sea-level rise and incursions of salt water. Many farmers on the coast have stopped cultivating sugar cane and oilseed due to the rising levels of salinity. Local fish species cannot tolerate salty conditions, which has put fish farmers in conflict with rice farmers as they compete for fresh water. The addition of brackish aquaculture of non-local fish would be beneficial.

Several salt-tolerant plants, such as Atriplex species, tamarisk (Tamarix species), mangrove (Avicennia marina), Korean lawn grass (Zoysia japonica), Euphorbia and Salicornia, are now commercially available and grow well in saline coastal areas. These plants are able to provide food, fodder and desalinate soils. Research should be conducted to assess their suitability for Bangladesh because they are used in coastal areas of countries in the Middle East and South Asia.

Inform the fight against it. A centralized sewerage system is likely to be too costly for Bangladesh, and is viable only in the long term. Many city homes have low-cost, simple septic tanks on site. Most of them release effluent that is partially treated into the water. Researchers can help governments understand trade-offs by improving surface and ground water quality monitoring and by assessing financial costs of such systems.

Ongoing efforts to deal with arsenic contamination include drilling deeper wells, piping clean surface waters or helping people to switch to lower-arsenic sources where available. These efforts would be aided by inexpensive real-time monitoring systems for water quality.

John D. Sutter: Climate change, the future of science and the role of the environment in tackling climate change — Commentary on the UN climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh

Editor’s Note: John D. Sutter is a CNN contributor, climate journalist and independent filmmaker whose work has won the Livingston Award, the IRE Award and others. The George Washington University appointed him as the Ted Turner Professor of Environmental Media. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

A new fund for “loss and damage” was established by the UN climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, which was attended by nearly 200 countries. It was the first time wealthy, industrialized countries and groups, including longtime holdouts like the US and the EU, agreed to establish such a fund.

The Alliance of Small Island States argued that the people who caused the pollution should pay for it.

Excuses and stall tactics are what other arguments against loss-and-damage payments are about. The harm is undeniable at this point, as is the cause. The international charity estimates the climate losses will reach $1 trillion annually by the end of the century.

After decades of deflection, it’s overdue for high-polluting countries like the United States to take this question seriously. These losses to territory, culture, life and property should be held accountable by the polluter.

The authors don’t want to tell you what to do. No solution was held up as the right one. Instead, scientists warn that there is no time, and no reason, to delay action on climate change. Reducing reliance on fossil fuels is the main driver of climate change.

The less carbon we put into the atmosphere, the less risk we put into the climate system — with important consequences for sea levels, storms, drought, biodiversity and so-on.

Action against Fossil Fuel Pollution by the Oil and Gas Industry: a Commission on Small Island Climate Change and International Law (CISC 2013)

Arguments against action have taken many forms over the decades. The most laughable, in retrospect, is that this was a problem for the future rather than the present.

The onslaught of ever-worsening heat waves, droughts, wildfires and storms can feel both urgent and numbing. Humans have been burning fossil fuels for so long that we have made the planet more dangerous.

That may feel like a new phenomenon, but it’s been decades in the making. Scientists linked a deadly 2003 heat wave in Europe, for example, to human-caused warming. The heat wave was thought to have killed 20,000 people.

An analysis shows that the oil and gas industry has made a huge amount of bucks in the last 50 years. That includes more than $31.3 trillion in profit for fossil fuel companies between the year 2000 and 2019, according to a recent report, “The Cost of Delay,” released by the Loss and Damage Collaboration and supported by two dozen organizations.

Short of international efforts to fund a loss-and-damage process, countries and individuals are turning to the courts. A Peruvian farmer, for example, is suing a German fossil fuel company over a melting glacier that threatens his home and farm. The German company, RWE, has been accused of creating more fossil fuel pollution than any other company in the world, according to news reports. RWE claims that it should not be held responsible for the damage.

The Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law was formed by Tuvalu and other countries. The aim is to explore claims in international courts.

“Litigation is the only way we will be taken seriously while the leaders of big countries are dillydallying,” Gaston Browne, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said last year, according to The New York Times. “We want to force them to respond in a court of law.”

The 2022 climate crisis in Tonga, South Africa, the Mississippi River and the Rhine River: from volcanic eruptions to Italy’s Tongatapu, Italy

From a small island in Polynesia to the white-sand beaches of Florida, the planet experienced a dizzying number of climate and extreme weather disasters in 2022.

Scientists in the US have succeeded in producing a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it used, a huge step towards the future of clean energy.

And at the United Nations’ COP27 climate summit in Egypt, nearly 200 countries agreed to set up a fund to help poor, vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters they had little hand in causing.

“There was some encouraging climate action in 2022. but we remain far off track to meet our goals of reducing global heat-trapping emissions and limiting future planetary warming”, says the Union of Concerned Scientists’ principal climate scientist. “There must be a stronger collective commitment and progress toward slashing emissions in 2023 if we are to keep climate extremes from becoming even more devastating.”

The volcano sent waves around the world in January. The blast was so loud that it could be heard thousands of miles away. The afternoon sky turned pitch black as heavy ash clouded Tonga’s capital and caused “significant damage” along the western coast of the main island of Tongatapu.

It was later that scientists discovered that the eruption belched an enormous amount of water into the earth’s stratosphere which was enough to fill tens of thousands of swimming pools. The massive plume of water vapor will likely contribute to more global warming at ground-level for the next several years, NASA scientists reported.

Northern Italy saw the most severe deficit in more than 70 years. The River Po hit a record low because of the dry winter and limited snow cover in the Alps. 30% of the country’s food is produced along the river and millions of people depend on it for their livelihood.

Also fed by winter snowpack in the Alps along with spring rains, Germany’s Rhine River dropped to “exceptionally low” levels in some areas, disrupting shipping in the country’s most important inland water way. The cargo ships began carrying lighter loads because of the little rain.

Meanwhile in the US, extreme drought spread into the central states and gauges along the Mississippi River and its tributaries plummeted. Barge traffic moved in fits and starts as officials dredged the river. The Mississippi River dropped so low that the Army Corps of Engineers was forced to build a 1,500-foot-wide levee to prevent Gulf-of-Mexico saltwater from pushing upstream.

Biden’s Climate, Energy and Tax Agenda After a Year and a Half: The Case of Hurricane Nicole in Yellowstone National Park

After more than a year of negotiations, Democrats in late July reached an agreement on President Joe Biden’s long-stalled climate, energy and tax agenda.

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin was influential in delaying the bill’s passage. The White House and Biden administration had tried for months to get the senator to support the bill over dinner and ziplining.

An analysis suggests the measures in the bill will reduce US carbon emissions by roughly 40% by 2030 and would put Biden well on his way to achieving his goal of slashing emissions in half by 2030.

At least five people died as a result of Hurricane Nicole. Hurricane Ian was a category 4 storm that wreaked havoc on the west coast of Florida.

Nicole had a wind field more than 500 miles long and high tides, which resulted in catastrophic storm surge. Homes and buildings collapsed into the ocean in Volusia County, with authorities scrambling to issue evacuation warnings.

The summer’s series of floods started off in Yellowstone National Park in June, when extreme rainfall and rapidly melting snow washed out roads and bridges in the park, causing significant damage to the nearby town of Gardiner, Montana, at the park’s entrance. Authorities had to rescue more than 100 people from the floods.

The year also brought several 1,000-year rainfall events. Normally, a 1000 year rainfall event would be seen on average once every 1000 years. But extreme rainfall is becoming more common as the climate crisis pushes temperatures higher. Warmer air can hold more moisture, which loads the dice in favor of historic rainfall.

Dallas, Texas, got an entire summer of rain in just 24 hours in August, prompting more than 350 high-water rescues.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/world/top-climate-weather-stories-2022/index.html

The Colorado River Drainage: From Europe’s Coolest Days to the Greenest Days of the Summer, and Back Again in the UK and Central Europe

Europe’s summer was the hottest on record. While the heat kicked off early in France, Portugal and Spain, with the countries reaching record-warmth in May, the most significant heat came in mid-July, spreading across the UK and central Europe.

The UK has never set a temperature of more than 40 degrees Celsius, 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Stephen Belcher, the UK Met Office’s chief scientist, said this would have been “virtually impossible” in an “undisrupted climate.”

The 40-degree day caused an “unprecedented day” in the history of the London Fire brigade, according to one fire official.

The past few years have been a reality check for western states that heavily rely on the Colorado River for water and electricity. Plagued by decades of overuse and a climate change-fueled drought, the river that serves 40 million people in seven western states and Mexico is draining at an alarming rate.

The drinking water and power supply in the area is at risk with the water levels in its two main lakes falling rapidly. In late July, Lake Mead – the country’s largest reservoir – bottomed out and has only rebounded a few feet off record lows. Its rapidly plunging levels revealed human remains from the 1970s and a sunken vessel from World War II.

The federal government implemented its first-ever mandatory water cuts this year for states that draw from the Colorado River, and those cuts will be even deeper starting in January 2023.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/28/world/top-climate-weather-stories-2022/index.html

The Water Conference: Bringing the United Nations Water Sustainable Development Goals to an Institutional Vow. The United Nations Account of Pakistan’s Past, Present, Future and Future

Floods caused by record monsoon rain and melting glaciers in Pakistan’s northern mountain regions claimed the lives of more than 1,400 people this summer, with millions more affected by clean water and food shortages. More than a third of Pakistan was submerged, and authorities warned it would take months for the flood waters to get back to normal.

Pakistan is responsible for less than one percent of the world’s warming emissions, yet it is the 8th most vulnerable nation in the world to the climate crisis.

In late September of this year, a Category 4 storm named “Ian” made landfall in Southwest Florida, hitting the Caribbean and leaving a trail of destruction that traveled all the way to the Carolinas. Swiss Re has data that says Ian’s insured losses are expected to reach $65 billion.

Scientists told CNN that the trend for the most dangerous storms is related to the storm that first struck Cuba. That same week, Super Typhoon Noru in the Philippines grew from the equivalent of a category 1 hurricane to a category 5 overnight as residents around Manila slept, catching officials and residents unaware and unable to prepare.

In 2015, the international community declared tackling the water crisis one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The sixthSDG commits the world to ensure availability and sustainable management of water and Sanitation for all. But the UN acknowledges that SDG 6 is “alarmingly off track”.

The conference will produce a ‘water action agenda’. He says this will involve voluntary commitments. “There’s nothing binding, there is no equivalent to the Paris [climate] agreement.” Moreover, there’s no leading UN body that is responsible for implementing and monitoring progress for all water-related SDGs. The conference is in an institutional void. While we are busy with the water conference, we are not very busy with water.

Last October, the UN published the results of a consultation with government representatives as well as specialist and stakeholder communities on their priorities for the conference. Around 12% of the respondents were from the education, science and technology fields. Data and evidence, improved access to knowledge, and open research were all agreed upon by the majority of the people. Delegates attending the March conference will be looking to harness the full spectrum of established water sources and technologies, including freshwater and rainwater sources, treated groundwater, desalinated seawater and hydropower.

There’s a wealth of knowledge already out there, in the form of established technologies, innovative alternatives and research that captures centuries-old knowledge and the practices of communities themselves. The knowledge has been ignored or forgotten in the past. Twenty years ago, for example, the UN invested in a major piece of research that captured examples of how communities living in water-stressed regions have used research and innovation to access water. A research showed how people in dry areas of China store snow in cellars during the winter that can be melted in the summer.

Some paths are clear. Damir Brdjanovic at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands writes in Nature Water that there’s a vast body of research on alternatives to sewered sanitation — and how to use less or no water to safely dispose of faecal matter and inactivate pathogens2. There are alternatives to the flush toilet and underground, piped sewer networks. There are ways to create hydropower in Africa and Asia without having the same social and environmental impacts as other areas, according to a paper written by Rongrong Xu in Shenzhen.

The Nature Portfolio Report: Findings for Action in the Context of Climate Change and the Sustainable Development Goals of Developing and Low-Income Countries

The delegates assembling in New York need to accept that their countries’ visions will not be realized until all nations can somehow carve out a path to cooperate amid tension and conflict. Research can help to provide at least some of the right language, which is why it needs to be taken on board when decisions are being made. The Nature Portfolio intends to do its part to make that happen.

The report was drafted by top climate scientists and reviewed by delegates from nearly 200 countries. The authors hope it will provide crucial guidance to politicians around the world ahead of negotiations later this year aimed at reining in climate change.

Simple, immediate solutions such as quickly shifting to renewable energy sources and stopping new oil and gas drilling can be found. They are also more aspirational ones, such as investing in research that could one day allow technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the air.

The planet is currently 2 degrees warmer than it was in the 1800s, and is predicted to be 5 degrees Warmer by the end of the century.

That kind of extreme warming would spell disaster for billions of people, as well as critical ecosystems, and would lead to irreversible sea level rise and mass extinction of plants and animals.

The hope is that this report will serve as a shared scientific foundation for those negotiations, as well as a menu of solutions for world leaders.

When it comes to climate change, it’s usually easy to forget about the bad outcomes and scary things, says Solomon Hsiang, a climate scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.

The report says that by Investing in low-carbon public transportation,designing communities to support walking or biking and building homes and other buildings to be resilient, you can reduce air pollution and save lives in low-lying and low-income neighborhoods.

The other big takeaway from the report is that people in developing countries, and poor people around the world, are disproportionately affected by climate change.

Between 2010 and 2020 there were fifteen times more human deaths from floods, droughts and storms in highly vulnerable regions compared to regions with very low vulnerability.

According to the report, people living in countries that are low-income, people who live on island nations, and Indigenous people around the world are among the most vulnerable.

According to a climate researcher who works with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we are not all in this together. “The poorest and most marginalized communities are the most vulnerable, in all cities and in all regions.”

When it comes to the international sustainable-development policy agenda, water has been off the table at least for the last few years, according to an official at the International Water Management Institute.

Several low-income countries asked for financial support, but were rejected and instead a study was developed on how to finance water projects.

The director general of UNESCO says there is an urgent need to establish mechanisms to keep the water crisis from getting out of control.

But setting up a new treaty or institutional UN body will take many years. Instead, delegates will call for water to be prioritized in existing treaties and in the UN system.

Grants for projects like the desalination of saltwater or the treatment of wastewater will be called for more often by some countries. The Amman based spokesman for Jordan’s water and irrigation ministry says there is a lot of international support. He says loans make the financial pressures on already-struggling economies worse.

The UN secretary-general is planning to raise money for his plan to create climate early-warning systems in all UN member states so that they are better prepared for extreme events. “Only half of our 193 members have proper early-warning services in place,” says Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, based in Geneva, Switzerland, which is working with Guterres to implement the plan. “We need some US$3 billion during the coming five years,” adds Taalas. So far, around 10% of this has been raised, through different sources.

Water Efforts in the 21st Century: Global Climate Crisis in the Light of Recent Developments in Population Growth and Industrialization

Water use has increased by 1% annually over the last forty years, due to population growth and changed consumption patters according to the UN World Water Development Report published Tuesday.

Urban and industrial growth and agriculture are compounding existing shortages, with agriculture alone using up 70% of the world’s water supply, Connor said.

There will be a global water shortage if there is no action taken, according to the report’s lead author at a news conference.

The authors of the report stated that there could be consequences for plants and animals if the climate crisis continues.

Efforts to reduce pollution and data sharing should open the door to further collaboration and increased access to water funds, he said.