Numerous people were killed and millions of people had their lives made unpleasant by the early and unpredictable rains that caused massive floods in Bangladesh and northeastern India. Scientists attribute this to climate change.
Flooding is not uncommon in the area, but it usually happens later in the year, when the monsoon rains are already well under way.
The region was hit with severe rains this year as early as March. Scientists claim that the monsoon, a seasonal change in weather typically associated with severe rains, has been more erratic over the past few decades. It may take much longer to assess how much climate change contributed to the floods. This indicates that a significant portion of the rain that was forecast to fall over the course of a year has already begun.
In just the first three weeks of the month, Meghalaya in northeastern India received nearly three times as much rain as it often does in June, and Assam, a nearby state, received twice as much rain as it typically does in the same time frame. From the two states, a number of rivers, including one of Asia’s biggest, run into the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation with a dense population.
Bangladesh’s Flood Forecast and Warning Centre issued a warning on Tuesday that the country’s northern regions will continue to experience dangerously high water levels as further rain is expected over the next five days.
Since the 1950s, the pattern of the monsoons, which are essential for the agrarian economy of India and Bangladesh, has changed, with extended dry spells interspersed with torrential rain, according to Roxy. Extreme rainfall occurrences were also anticipated to rise, said Matthew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune.
Floods in northeastern Bangladesh were formerly uncommon, while Assam state, famous for its tea farming, typically had to deal with them later in the year during the typical monsoon season. Anjal Prakash, a research director at India’s Bharti Institute of Public Policy who has participated to a U.N.-sponsored study on global warming, called the current floods a ‘exceptional’ situation due to the sheer amount of early rain this year that lashed the region in just a few weeks.
We have never heard of or seen anything like this, he declared.
Similar pessimism was expressed by Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Wednesday.
We haven’t had to deal with a problem like this in a while. She said at a news conference in Dhaka that infrastructure needed to be built to handle such disasters. She said that there is no imminent relief for the nation, saying ‘the water entering from Meghalaya and Assam has damaged the Sylhet region’ in northeastern Bangladesh.
Hasina predicted that while floodwaters in the northeast would soon recede, they would likely soon go to the Bay of Bengal and devastate the country’s southern region.
She said, ‘We should get ready to face it. We must keep in mind that flooding occurs frequently in the area where we reside. We have to get ready for that.’
Since May 17, a total of 42 people have perished in Bangladesh, while 78 people have perished in Assam state due to flooding in India, according to authorities, and 17 more have perished in landslides.
Millions of people in the area have been compelled to rush to temporary evacuation centres, and hundreds of thousands have been made homeless.
Historically, Bangladesh, which has a population of 160 million, has contributed a small portion of global emissions. A ten-year-old agreement for wealthier countries, who have contributed more to global emissions, to provide $100 billion to poorer countries each year to help them adapt to climate change and switch to cleaner fuels hasn’t been carried out. Furthermore, the available funds are dispersed too thinly
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