OP-ED: A world at risk

A crisis far greater than Covid-19 looms over the horizon
After the devastating flood of 1988 which affected about 50% of Bangladesh and which triggered the infamous Flood Action Plan, the next major flood was in 1998 when about 70% of the country was affected. 

To get an idea of the scale of the flooding in 1998, the Kemal Ataturk Road between Banani and Gulshan was impassable for some days and there was standing water in some of the Banani roads for up to six weeks. The road between Savar and Dhaka was impassable, and the only way in from that side was through the road via Ashulia which was kept open, day and night, by army engineers. 

At about this time, various disaster preparedness experts in Bangladesh and elsewhere raised the concern of global warming with a focus on which countries around the world will be affected by sea level rise. In 1999, the British TV’s “Channel 4” made a series of four one-hour programs entitled The Drowning Earth, featuring different kinds of disasters in different continents. 

When filming was going on in Chowhali Upazila of Sirajganj district in Bangladesh, the local farmers told of how they were observing that the river starts rising a few days earlier each year due to the Himalayan snow melting a bit earlier each year. However, at the time, nobody listened to them, as they were classified as “ignorant and uneducated.”