Building resilience to floods in vulnerable Bangladesh
Natural hazardsArticleAugust 24, 2015
People in coastal Bangladesh are often devastated by flooding, especially during the annual monsoon season. To strengthen our work there, we have launched a Global Water Resilience Program, together with the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP). This new relationship also broadens the scope of our operations, as the GRP has other programs in the Horn of Africa, Asia and the Sahel.
Over 60 million people, over a third of whom live below the poverty line, suffer monsoon flooding, salt water intrusion, drought, severe river erosion, rising sea-levels and land subsidence in coastal Bangladesh. Every year, over ten percent of all crops are lost due to flooding and 30,000 people are displaced due to severe river erosion and floods. Climate change and human actions are aggravating these problems. For example, the damming of the Ganges in India has reduced the flow of fresh water, increasing the salinity of Bangladesh’s rivers.
Illiteracy, erosion and other problems
Let’s take a closer look at some of these problems. River erosion is found in many poor areas because the river is disregarded. Every time it rains heavily, the river takes away living space and threatens livelihoods. In Bangladesh this happens every year over several months. People try to remodel the river to suit their own purposes: by filling up the river a community upstream gains more living space (by building new houses directly on the river’s edge). But the river’s direction has thereby been changed, causing erosion further downstream and severely affecting other communities.
Although there is an early warning system that provides information on severe river bank erosion, it does not work as well as it could. The system can provide at most a three-day warning of downstream water movement, whereas it should be able to provide near real-time information on severe river bank erosion. There are also problems with getting the information out to the right people. Over 80 percent of the coastal population has cell phone access, but roughly half the population is illiterate and early warnings are often sent via text message.
Another problem is salt water intrusion. This is mainly due to saltwater shrimp farming, which was introduced in the early 1980s with big financial incentives. Saltwater shrimp farming often destroys surrounding rice and vegetable farmland when the salt leeches out the saltwater ponds.
Local solutions to meet global challenges
By setting up a fund to support local solutions run by local stakeholders in local settings, the Global Water Resilience Challenge can make a real difference to communities at risk of floods. In Bangladesh, for example, this approach allows NGOs, local governments and community institutions to come together to identify a common problem and work together to find shared solutions. This might mean helping people to learn how to better manage exposed areas on river banks. It could also lead them to use floodwaters to promote livelihoods. And, it could provide education to enable people to make better use of early-warning systems. A ‘water resources center’ now being developed will offer three facilities to meet the most urgent needs: 1) a community-organized school dedicated to local water management 2) a training facility for evaluating research on local water initiatives and 3) a water data center allowing other organizations working together with the GRP to gauge water quality and quantity, including surface and ground water table assessment, salinization, severe river erosion, flood early warning and land subsidence, to make it easier to assess hazards and potential solutions.
This planned project in Bangladesh is just one example of how we envision supporting collaborative and innovative solutions that are developed locally in Asia, the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. We also hope that with the support of organizations involved, these solutions can be replicated and scaled up to be used in other flood-prone communities around the world. The journey has just begun.
Disclaimer: Views expressed on this page and in the reports are not necessarily those of the Zurich Insurance Group, which accepts no responsibility for them.