This climate adaptation report by World Wildlife Fund India captures its experience on climate change in the Sundarbans. Beginning in 2005, WWF-India has conducted dozens of personal interviews to record how climate change impacts people's lives here and now. These perceptions demanded that scientific studies be carried out to ascertain the veracity of the claims.
The report draws heavily from the studies undertaken by the School of Oceanographic Studies, Jadavpur University at the micro-level as well as across the Indian Sundarbans. These studies made it possible to design initiatives that enhance risk preparedness as well as adaptive capacity of vulnerable communities that ensure physical and livelihood security, and reduce sensitivity in case of exposure to high intensity weather events. Not all of these were successful, for example, attempts to raise mangrove plantation. The successful ones are briefly described in the last chapter of the report.
The eco-region that forms the Sundarbans is both unique, and uniquely fragile. Unique because it is one of the most extensive mangrove forests in the world, existing in a vast deltaic region where freshwater and seawater mix. Also unique, because the human population that exists on the fringes of the coastal forest, in land that has been slowly adapted to cultivation over the last two centuries, confront challenges from both land, air, and sea that few other local populations have to contend with. And further unique, because the flora of the Sundarbans, the mangrove, presents a natural buffer, a bulwark against coastal erosion and seawater ingress into one of the most densely populated regions of the world. Ironically, the Sundarbans' fragility stems from its uniqueness.
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