Who pays for a dying river
A river that silts up, dries out or is filled in takes something from the people beside it: the land under their house, the water for the dry-season crop, the fish, the boat route, the drain that kept their street dry. These are the numbers the record gives.
Families on the bank
When a river is choked with silt it spreads sideways and eats its banks. The Jamuna, the Ganges and the Padma alone have made more people homeless than live in many cities.
On the Jamuna, the left bank retreated by an average of 52 metres a year between 1990 and 2020.[Abdeen et al.] In Munshiganj, Madaripur and Shariatpur, the Padma took 23,661 hectares of farmland in 35 years.[Begum et al.] See the Jamuna and the Padma from space.
People on the chars
About 6.5 million people, one in twenty Bangladeshis, live on chars: river islands of sand and silt that grow, move and vanish.[Kabir et al.] In one Faridpur char village studied in 2022, every household had lost land to the river and been displaced at least once.[Podder et al.]
Farmers and fishers when the water stops
The rivers on the dead-and-drying list threaten "livelihoods, agriculture, and local biodiversity", in the words of the study.[The Daily Star] The Teesta basin alone supports 11.5 million people and about 14% of Bangladesh's farmland; at Kaunia its dry-season flow fell to 1.47 m³/s in 2012.[Rahman et al.]
The city that filled its rivers
In the 1960s Dhaka was ringed by the Buriganga, Turag, Balu and Shitalakkhya and crossed by about 175 canals, beels and water bodies.[Dhaka Tribune] Since then, 95 canals have been lost or cut to less than half their length,[The Daily Star] and some 15,000 hectares of wetland have gone under concrete.[Dhaka Tribune] The water that once spread into them now floods the streets: researchers link the loss of wetlands directly to the city's waterlogging.[Islam et al.]
What is coming
River loss and climate change arrive together in the delta. The World Bank's projections put millions more people in the path.