The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

The effect of mainland Asia’s numbers is such as to vastly amplify the human impacts of global warming. Take, for instance, the Bengal Delta (a region that consists of most of Bangladesh and much of West Bengal). Formed by the confluence of two of the world’s mightiest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, this is one of the most densely populated parts of the world, with more than 250 million people living in an area about a quarter the size of Nigeria. The floodplains of Bengal are not likely to be submerged as soon or as completely as, say, the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu. But the population of Tuvalu is less than 10,000 while the partial inundation of just one island in Bangladesh—Bhola island—has led to the displacement of more than 5,00,000 people. Because of the density of its population, some of the world’s worst disasters have occurred in the Bengal Delta. The 1971 Bhola cyclone is thought to have killed 3,00,000 people. As recently as 1991, a cyclone in Bangladesh resulted in 1,38,000 dead, of whom 90 per cent were women. Sea-level rise and the increasing intensity of storms will make large-scale inundations more likely, all along the coastline. Moreover, in Bengal, as in other Asian deltas, for example those of the Irrawaddy, the Indus and the Mekong, another factor has magnified the effects of sea-level rise: this is that delta regions across Asia (and elsewhere in the world) are subsiding much faster than the oceans are rising. This is due partly to geol...