SAGAR ISLAND (West Bengal): Just weeks ago Subodh Patra, a villager on the Indian Sunderbans, lost the crops on his one-acre farm to rising sea water. And now he and his family dare not sleep at night for fear that even their humble dwelling will be inundated.

“On May 16 morning sea waters gushed in, breached the embankments and inundated our fields with saline waters, destroying all our crops,” said Patra’s 23-year-old son Gopal. “We spend sleepless nights worrying that during high tide our dwellings would be devoured too.”

Global warming and climate change are terms the Patra family had never heard of till the rising seas had begun to force him to join the thousands of prospective environmental refugees in the Sunderbans.

Home to the world’s largest mangrove gene pool and a World Heritage site as declared by Unesco, the Sunderbans face a threat from global warming and attendant climatic change. It is estimated by a recently released United Nations study that a mere 45 cm rise in the sea level will destroy 75 per cent of forests spread over a 10,000 sq km area in India’s eastern state of West Bengal and adjacent Bangladesh.

“There are already 7,000 environmental refugees in the Sunderbans and the numbers can only increase with the sea devouring more islands as a result of global warming and climate change,” said Prof. Pranabes Sanyal of the School of Oceanographic Studies in Jadavpur University (JU).

Mangroves of Sunderbans act as natural buffers against tropical cyclones and also as filtration systems for estuarine and fresh water. They also serve as nurseries for many marine invertebrate species and fish. The shrinking mangrove will leave India and Bangladesh vulnerable to the effects of disturbances in the Bay of Bengal, including tsunamis.

Conservations efforts are grossly inadequate. West Bengal’s Sunderbans affairs minister Kanti Ganguly said: “We have decided to raise the heights of the mud embankments and increase the mangrove cover.”

But people like Patra say they get little help from the local authorities. Ayesha, an elderly resident of Moushuni Island who lost three acres of farmland to the sea, said tearfully: “We have not heard of any resettlement. No one ever visits here as no one cares if we live or die.” —Dawn/The IPS News Service