Dhaka, April 22: Scientists in Bangladesh posed a fresh challenge to the UN’s top climate change panel Thursday, saying its doomsday forecasts for the country in the body’s landmark 2007 report were overblown.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), already under fire for errors in the 2007 report, had said a one-metre (three-foot) rise in sea levels would flood 17 percent of Bangladesh and create 20 million refugees by 2050.
The claim helped create a widespread consensus that the low-lying country was on the “front line” of climate change.
But the prediction ignored the role that at least one billion tonnes of sediment, carried by Himalayan rivers into Bangladesh every year, will play in countering sea level rises, a study funded by the Asian Development Bank said.
“Sediments have been shaping Bangladesh’s coast for thousands of years,” said Maminul Haque Sarker, director of the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS), who led research for the study.
Previous “studies on the effects of climate change in Bangladesh, including those quoted by the IPCC, did not consider the role of sediment in the growth and adjustment process of the country?s coast and rivers to the sea level rise,” he told AFP.
Even if sea levels rise a maximum one metre in line with the IPCC’s 2007 predictions, most of Bangladesh’s coastline will remain intact, said Sarker, adding the CEGIS study is “probably the most comprehensive” to date.
“Based on the findings of the study, it appears that most of Bangladesh?s coastline, notably the Meghna estuary, which is one of the largest in the world, would rise at the same pace as the sea level growth,” he said.
“The study shows that the inundation and flooding pattern of Bangladesh will change due to the sea level rise, but it will be less than what has been predicted,” by the IPCC and others, he said.
CEGIS’s past predictions of the number of people likely to be made homeless every year by the two main Himalayan rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, have proved to be 70 percent accurate, according to their own assessments.
The IPCC is made up of several thousand scientists tasked with vetting scientific knowledge on climate change and its impacts.
But its reputation was damaged by a warning in its seminal 2007 report that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035, a claim that has been widely discredited and fueled skepticism about climate change.
The panel’s research on Bangladesh “have not taken into account the role the sediment plays in shaping Bangladesh’s coast and estuaries,” Atiq Rahman, a Dhaka-based member of the panel, admitted to AFP.
“The next IPCC assessment will take it into account,” he said, adding that climate change could still cause a lot of damage in Bangladesh if the “rate of sea-level rise is faster than the level of sedimentation.”
—Agencies