India's vanishing villages - ground zero for climate change

LEAD-IN: For some 13 million impoverished villagers living precariously on the river deltas that spill into the Bay of Bengal, global warming is already a reality. Thousands are homeless as seas rise twice as fast as the global average and water eats away at the islands. Many are subsumed altogether in this vast region called the Sundarbans, straddling India and Bangladesh. STORY-LINE: These waters are deceptively calm. They are on the ecological frontline in the planet's battle against global warming. For India and Bangladesh, the ecologically sensitive and overpopulated Sundarbans is ground zero for climate change. It's a test for how the two countries will cope with warmer temperatures, rising seas and potentially millions of climate refugees. Climate change is also expected to exacerbate flooding and to strengthen the frequent storms and cyclones that barrel through the swampy region. Facing constant threats from roving tigers and crocodiles, deadly swarms of giant honeybees and poisonous snakes, the people here struggle to eke out a living by farming, shrimping, fishing and collecting honey from the forests. Each year, with crude tools and bare hands, they build mud embankments to keep the saltwater and wild animals from invading their homes and crops. And each year swollen rivers, monsoon rains and floods wash many of those banks and mud-packed homes back into the sea. The World Bank is spending hundreds of millions of dollars assessing and preparing a plan for the region. "In the last twenty - thirty years, because of big time environmental degradation their situation has become worse. And now with the climate change impacts looming large, and in fact in some places of Sundarban it can be argued that climate change impacts have already occurred. Anecdotal evidences suggest that seven thousand people are already displaced, because they have lost their islands. So the issue of climate refugee, which is supposed to be a big issue some years from now has already started happening in the Sundarban. So their situation has become worse from bad," says Tapas Paul, a Delhi-based World Bank environmental specialist. He says this could be one of the largest migrations of people ever seen since the India-Pakistan partition in 1947 when some 10 million people migrated from one country to another. Whatever lessons can be learned from the Sundarbans will be crucial, experts say, in addressing sea rise in other areas including elsewhere along India's 7,000-mile coastline and small island nations like the Maldives where people have nowhere to flee. 36 year old fisherman, Sorojit Majhi has had to move three times in four years because of the waters rising. Majhi is landless like many villagers here, living temporarily on a plot given to him by fellow villagers. He along with his wife and four daughters are living behind a crumbling embankment. They wait in fear for the water to make its next move. "My fear is the embankments breaking. When the embankments break then we have to keep moving further into land. Moving so many times�we have lost all our land. The river has taken our homes. I have nothing left. Now we are staying here�they are making a new embankment," says Majhi. Worried if they lose their home again, he says "We don't know where we will go from here." Most struggle on far less than $1 a day - making them among the poorest in the world. 60 year old Sujit Jana, who has lived all his life in the Sundarbans, has lost everything to rising seas. After building his new home with his life savings, he now works as a labourer on other villagers farms to make ends meet. He hopes to rebuild his fish pond, which was once a major source of food for him and his wife. You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/9a32cdd3100fd9e73cd7149e384f6d00 Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork