It came as a major setback with nightmarish experience to sexagenarian Mosharraf Hossaion when he faced with the loss of homestead land, housing structure and arable land a few years back due to erosion of the mighty Meghna River. Like many affected people, loss of homestead forced Mosharraf to move to a new place without any option and put him in a disastrous situation.
His present state of life is filled with despair and uncertainty as he uttered “Once I had a happy family at Vendar Village of Sukh Char Union Parishad in Hatiya upazila of Noakhali district. But, riverbank erosion grabbed our home and all the belongings as Hatiya is located at the mouth of the Meghna River in the Bay of Bengal”.
The force of nature- river erosion- compelled Mosharraf to leave everything behind including homestead land, housing structure, crops, cattle, trees and household utensils as his family shifted to Aladia village of Burir Char Union of the same upazila and took shelter on an embankment near the sea. “Not only Vendar Village, two other villages went under seawater compelled many people like us to be displaced,” Mosharraf said, adding their sufferings have increased manifold due to extreme weather events like tidal surge and cyclone every year since they live in very close to the sea. Likewise, Nizam Maji also faced such a precarious condition as he was also displaced losing his homestead to seawater. He said displacement makes their lives miserable as they not only lost their house and belongings, but also lost their family roots after displacement, putting them in an uncertain future.
Internally displacement is a common phenomenon in Hatiya as a vast area of the island is being devoured by the riverbank erosion accelerated by sea level rise.
According to officials at Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB), several hundreds of acres of arable land, many houses, markets, mosques, educational institutions, roads, cyclone shelters, and 14 kilometres of embankments of the island went under seawater in the last couple of years. Erosion is also continuing to take place in many points of the Hatiya Island, putting many islanders at the risk of displacement. Nizam Maji said after losing agricultural land and houses to the erosion, many families of Karingchar, Boyarchar and Nolerchar of the island left their areas and have taken refuge in cyclone shelters.
A 2016 Brac report says about 27 million people are predicted to be at risk of sea level rise in Bangladesh by 2050, while two-thirds of the country are less than five metres above sea level.
The affected people are confronting such perilous situations without any adequate institutional and structural supports and are devising their own formulated strategies to cope with the conditions. They are out to make efforts both physically and socially to survive with the situations by sea erosions. The impacts of sea level rise on coastal regions are sudden and episodic hazards, indicating that global sea level rise will be a major challenge with severe implications on human civilisations.
