From the Bay of Bengal to the Coast of California
By: Antara Murshed, Volunteer at the California Coastal Commission’s Public Education Program and graduate of the University of San Francisco's environmental science program
The sun is distant and low in the sky as the tide swells along Laboni Beach in Cox’s Bazar. Several docked fishing boats bobbed along the shore, obstructing the otherwise clear view of the Bay of Bengal.
A group of 40 electrical engineering students from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (referred to as BUET) were milling about the beach. They were visiting the vast delta that makes up most of southern Bangladesh from Dhaka, the centrally located capital city. The only person supervising these students was my father, then a lecturer at BUET in his early twenties. Most of the fisherman and local children have gone home for the evening. Aside from his own students and a large flock of seabirds, my father noticed that the shore was practically deserted.
They had already visited the Kaptai Dam, Bangladesh’s only hydroelectric facility, located on the inland mouth of the Karnaphuli River and the nearby Betbunia Satellite Earth Station. Capitalizing on the excitement and freedom of being away from their campus in Dhaka, the BUET students unanimously agreed it was worth it to travel five hours south of their educational stops just so they could visit the coastline.
On that temperate November evening in 1982, my father visited the coast for the first time in his life. He was a recent graduate from BUET and took on a teaching position with the university in order to save up enough to get a masters degree in electrical engineering in America. Eleven years had passed since Bangladesh’s bloody liberation war from Pakistan in 1971 and my father still had a difficult time believing a place as pure and untouched as Laboni Beach could exist. Unless experienced firsthand, the traumas of living through genocide and civil war as a young child are unimaginable.
My father has been a resident of California since 1996 and for the last 21 years, he has explored the coast extensively. Growing up with my father in the early 2000s, we would visit coastal points of interests on the weekends, from McWay Falls along the Pacific Coast Highway to Point Reyes National Seashore. Hiking and enjoying California’s geological and ecological diversity is something my family has been doing for many years.
In 2001, my father had the chance to visit Cox’s Bazar once again. None of his recollection compared to the swarms of foreign tourists meandering about today. Swimming pools, shops, and resorts are now dispersed across the 75 mile long beach. As Bangladesh has industrialized more in the last 20 years, coastal development has increased as well. The problem with this in a country with the average elevation of 33 feet is imminent sea level rise. Cyclones and floods in Southern Bangladesh have always been common, as the narrow formation of the Bay of Bengal acts as a funnel for storms from the Indian Ocean and 80% of the country is a floodplain. However, increasing global temperatures and the melting of the polar ice caps will result in stronger floods, storms, and droughts. Instability in climate will impact Bangladesh’s economic stability as well, and the country’s ability to reduce poverty. Some things Bangladesh has done to prepare for sea level rise include setting up cyclone shelters, creating an extensive system of emergency response teams, and developing salinity resistant agriculture. Despite all this, impending sea level rise will uproot the lives of tens of millions of people and the home of my ancestors will disappear.
Rising sea levels are simultaneously a transnational problem and a local problem. Governing bodies have unique sets of rules and plans responding to sea level rise, but it is something that will impact all coastal regions. Having lived in California my entire life and knowing how my father feels connected to the coast both in Bangladesh and in California, the urgency of addressing and mitigating sea level rise is of great significance.
Read about how the California Coastal Commission is working to address sea level rise at https://www.coastal.ca.gov/climate/slr/
