Bangladesh gaining land, not losing: scientists

New data shows that Bangladesh's landmass is increasing, contradicting
forecasts that the South Asian nation will be under the waves by the end of
the century, experts say.

Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic
Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and
say Bangladesh's landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight
square miles) annually.

Maminul Haque Sarker, head of the department at the government-owned centre
that looks at boundary changes, told AFP sediment which travelled down the
big Himalayan rivers -- the Ganges and the Brahmaputra -- had caused the
landmass to increase.

The rivers, which meet in the centre of Bangladesh, carry more than a
billion tonnes of sediment every year and most of it comes to rest on the
southern coastline of the country in the Bay of Bengal where new territory
is forming, he said in an interview on Tuesday.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has
predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more
than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of rising
sea levels due to global warming.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning panel says 20 million Bangladeshis will become
environmental refugees by 2050 and the country will lose some 30 percent of
its food production.

Director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, professor
James Hansen, paints an even grimmer picture, predicting the entire country
could be under water by the end of the century.

But Sarker said that while rising sea levels and river erosion were both
claiming land in Bangladesh, many climate experts had failed to take into
account new land being formed from the river sediment.

"Satellite images dating back to 1973 and old maps earlier than that show
some 1,000 square kilometres of land have risen from the sea," Sarker said.

"A rise in sea level will offset this and slow the gains made by new
territories, but there will still be an increase in land. We think that in
the next 50 years we may get another 1,000 square kilometres of land."

Mahfuzur Rahman, head of Bangladesh Water Development Board's Coastal Study
and Survey Department, has also been analysing the buildup of land on the
coast.

He told AFP findings by the IPCC and other climate change scientists were
too general and did not explore the benefits of land accretion.

"For almost a decade we have heard experts saying Bangladesh will be under
water, but so far our data has shown nothing like this," he said.

"Natural accretion has been going on here for hundreds of years along the
estuaries and all our models show it will go on for decades or centuries
into the future."

Dams built along the country's southern coast in the 1950s and 1960s had
helped reclaim a lot of land and he believed with the use of new technology,
Bangladesh could speed up the accretion process, he said.

"The land Bangladesh has lost so far has been caused by river erosion, which
has always happened in this country. Natural accretion due to sedimentation
and dams have more than compensated this loss," Rahman said.

Bangladesh, a country of 140 million people, has built a series of dykes to
prevent flooding.

"If we build more dams using superior technology, we may be able to reclaim
4,000 to 5,000 square kilometres in the near future," Rahman said.