Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque and Dr. Md Shakhawat Ullah Chowdhury :
Policy makers have by now given a serious thought to the gravity of the crisis like environment degradation. Realizing that environment degradation stemming from climate change cannot be reversed they think to opt for mitigation of sufferings and dislocation and enhancement of coping capacities of the coastal inhabitants. Crisis management is a two-fold mechanism-mitigation and survival. As the finance minister said “We should aim to mitigate dislocation and build the capacity to adapt lives and livelihoods” A detailed action plan will be taken to combat ‘disasters due to climate change’. The government has the plan to complete the review of medium and long term strategies to be prepared to ‘prevent the disasters’.
Our think tanks are to review environment policy to combat climate change. Environment means our surroundings, which comprises of land, water and air and other bodies. Environment is affected by the physical properties of these components. It is also affected by the changes in interrelationship prevailing between an among the components ranging from micro organism to human bodies
Our life support system is maintained by all the species that make up the biosphere biodiversity. The survival of all these species are interconnected and dependent on each other. Human being is also a part of this biosphere, extinction of one species is really the extinction of many species and the decline of our life support system for ourselves and future generations. So, all the components of the environment are equally important for human being as well as for the other species. life-system’s biosphere-life-
All the same they think to maintain ecological balance and bio-diversity in the Sundarbans. Production of environment friendly renewable energy technologies is under active consideration. There is a plan to ‘bring 20 per cent of total land under afforestation programmes by 2015 to attain self-sufficiency in forest resources’.
Our think tanks at numerous climate seminars home and abroad talked in terms of conserving land and water in Bangladesh taking lesson learned from super cyclones – aila and sidre for example. They stressed long term planning on sustainable basis to minimize cyclone devastation and its aftermath suggesting a special design of embankment and ‘planting deep-rooted tree species in the coastal belt and promoting salinity-resistant or tolerant crops’.
We are now familiar with a lot of slogans like cleaning air, clear suffocation, greening country, save river, protect bio-diversity – thanks to the campaign for ecology friendly sustainable development all over the world. The government guns for long term plan for river recovery, checking pollution, massive afforestation and promoting renewable energy.
It is heartening to note that action has been taken to recover river. There are reports that huge illegal structures built along the banks of Buriganga, Turag and Sitalakhya have been knocked down barring some stray incidence of resistance against river recovery operation. The DCs of Dhaka, Narayanganganj, Gazipur and Munshiganj have been asked by the High Court (HC) to ‘take measures to protect the rivers under their jurisdiction’ Some pieces of land created by encroachment on the river bank have been recovered; more to be done to demarcate the rivers.
(Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque, Professor, Department of Public Administration, Chittagong University and Dr. Md Shakhawat Ullah Chowdhury , Assistant Professor of Social Science, Southern University Bangladesh)
