The Sundarbans – lies on the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers on the Bay of Bengal. According to the World Wildlife Fund India, this active delta region is among the largest in the world, measuring about 40,000 sq km. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Sundarbans is one of the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest spread over an area of 10,000 square kilometers, 60 per cent of which lies in Bangladesh and the rest in India. According to Sundarban National park India Official website, the 4000 sq. km of Sundarbans is on the Indian side has 102 islands, out of which 54 are inhabited and the rest are covered with forest.
The unique landscape of Sundarbans with its intricate tidal waterways, rivers, creeks, backwaters, low lying islands, swamps and stretches of mudflats, provides a diverse habitat for various species of plants and animals, be it terrestrial or aquatic. Home to the endangered Royal Bengal Tiger, it is the only mangrove tiger habitat in the world. According to World Heritage Convention (UNESCO), apart from the tiger, some of the other threatened species of the area are estuarine crocodile, Gangetic Dolphin, Olive Ridley Turtle and Water Monitor Lizard.
Threatened animal species of Sundarbans
One of the reasons why it is tagged as the UNESCO world heritage site is because it is the only remaining habitat in the lower Bengal Basin, which has a wide variety of faunal species, states World Heritage Convention (UNESCO). Sundarbans gets its name from Sundari, the local name of the mangrove species, Heritierafomes Buch-Ham. (ME). Sundari means beautiful in Bangla. Broadly, there are two types of mangroves – freshwater loving and saltwater loving. Species like Sundari and Nipa love fresh water whereas Avicennia (grey mangrove or white mangrove) can sustain high salinity. Due to the lack of availability of freshwater in Indian Sundarbans, species like Sundari, which used to be dominant specie, is disappearing. Gradually, all fresh water loving mangrove species are now getting replaced with the ones that can withstand salinity.
Sundarbans on the frontlines of climate change
Slowly but steadily climate change is transforming the reality of Sundarbans. Home to a large human population – 4.5 million in India, as per World Wildlife Fund, the consequences of climate change are hitting lives and livelihoods hard. With the ocean swallowing up land in the world’s largest mangrove forest, humans and tigers are being squeezed into an ever-shrinking space. Flooding of low-lying deltas, the retreat of shorelines, salinisation and acidification of soils, and changes in the water table, Sundarbans is dealing with all kinds of dire consequences.
According to World Wildlife Fund, four islands have vanished in Sundarbans due to the effects of climate change in the last 25 years — Bedford, Lohachara, Kabasgadi, and Suparibhanga. Lohachara became well-known as the world’s first inhabited island to be submerged in 2006. Sagar, a delta island with a population of 200,000 in the Bay of Bengal has lost almost 12 per cent of its shoreline to coastal erosion in the last four decades, according to NASA Landsat satellite imagery. The region today serves as a prominent climate change “hotspot” for climate researchers. NASA Landsat satellite imagery also shows that the sea level has risen in the Sundarbans by an average of 3 centimeters (1.2 inches) a year, over the past two decades, leading to one of the fastest rates of coastal erosion in the world.
The fast-encroaching sea, driven by climate change, has also eaten away at the hunting grounds of the Sundarbans’ famous Bengal tigers, pushing them to target livestock of villagers and increasingly, the villagers themselves. Not just that, the Forest Survey of India states that in the last decade, very dense mangrove cover in West Bengal has declined by 4.23 per cent – from 1,038 square km in 2011 to 994 square km in 2021…