Playing catchup amid floods in Bangladesh

Junayed Ahmed was looking forward to celebrating Eid-al-Adha with his parents in the city of Sylhet in eastern Bangladesh. But then rain started pelting down, the river Surma began to rise and his house was flooded. “With knee-deep water in our single-storey house and its yard, we just had to postpone the important ritual,” said the 25-year-old mechanic. Monsoon rains are to be expected in this part of northeastern Bangladesh, and the government has improved its ability to deal with any resulting floods, but as climate change accelerates, authorities seem trapped in a relentless game of catch-up.

Climate change has led to a four-fold increase in rainfall levels during the monsoon season in Bangladesh and northeast India, according to a 2023 study published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, says Reuters. “Rain does not follow the calendar anymore and we see sudden, unprecedented downpours that leave us with no preparation time,” said Farzana Raihan, professor of environmental science at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in Sylhet. In June, when Eid-al-Adha is celebrated, torrential rain – up to 240mm in just one week in some northeastern districts –combined with upstream water from India to trigger flash floods that left more than 2 million people stranded. Bangladesh, a low-lying country where floodplains cover more than 80% of the land, is also still recovering from a cyclone that hit its southern coastal belt in May.

Since flash floods killed around 140 people two years ago, the government has tried to boost its preparedness – it has strengthened its warning systems, arranged more shelters for people, and prepared better aid distribution.

Working with international and local development organisations, the government set up stronger, more localised weather forecasting systems that issued timely warnings, said Jyotiraj Patra, programme director at Concern Worldwide, which has been working with the government on flood response. His organisation alerted 10,000 households and provided cash assistance to 1,120 vulnerable households during the June floods. Thanks to that early alert, more than 50,000 people were able to take refuge in upgraded flood shelters, the Reuters report adds. “There is strong evidence that early warnings save lives,” Patra said.

But even if lives were saved this time, the floods took a heavy toll on the livelihoods of some vulnerable groups, including the fish farmers of the Sylhet region. Thousands of fish ponds, mostly used to farm carp, were flooded with financial losses reaching 1.34 billion taka ($11.45 million), according to the Divisional Fisheries Department. As well as destroyed livelihoods, the floods affected people’s health, with children being particularly vulnerable. The UN children’s agency UNICEF said more than 772,000 children were in urgent need of assistance after last month’s floods and faced heightened risks of drowning, malnutrition, deadly waterborne diseases, the trauma of displacement, and potential abuse in overpopulated shelters.

Mohammad Paplu Miah, who works for the international development organisation BRAC delivering aid to those affected by the floods, said his two-year-old son got bad diarrhoea during the last flood in 2022. “We went from one hospital to another wading through floodwater and everyone refused to admit my son as the hospitals were flooded – until we found one that could provide him with saline and saved his life,” he said.

Floods also affect children’s education – more than 800 schools in the Sylhet district were flooded in June and another 500 were used as flood shelters. In July, dozens of schools were submerged in the northern Kurigram district.

Patra from Concern Worldwide said there was a need for more fine-grained data to identify those most at risk from floods. He said since flooding in the northeast was particularly linked to rainfall and river systems in India, there should also be more data-sharing between the two countries.