COP-28 Summit in Dubai rallies mothers in climate crisis.
In Chargheri, the last village on the southeastern side of the Indian Sundarbans, Anushka Rai, 3, stands on the steps of her school, Purbasha Rural Child Education Centre, and recites a poem by a little-known Bangladeshi poet. The one-room school is singularly positioned—it stands on land that is battered by back-to-back cyclones. On the other side of the Garal river that flows past the village is the famous tiger territory of Sunderbans.
Anushka’s poem is about nature. “Khoob shundor,” says Umashankar Mandal, 45, founder of Purbasha. The only teacher in the school, Shampa Paik, gets down to implementing the school’s itinerary for the day, where the students, all under six, have 30-minute classes each in Bangla, English, and Math, followed by poetry, storytelling, and art on nature in the Sunderbans.
Starting November 30, as 193 UN member countries get together in Dubai for the 28th Conference of Parties climate summit to discuss the seemingly intractable problem of climate change, here in the Sundarbans, one of the most ecologically threatened regions, is a unique community-led model that offers the way forward.
Historically, the Sundarbans, a complex network of islands set in the delta on the Bay of Bengal and spread across West Bengal and Bangladesh, has been battered by storm surge floods, cyclones, salinity intrusion, rising sea levels, land subsidence, water logging, coastal erosion, and biodiversity loss.
It was after one such battering that the region took—the 2009 Cyclone Aila, which uprooted trees, flattened homes, and rendered the shoreline bare—that Umashankar, who was born and raised in Chargheri before migrating to Murshidabad to teach geography at Jangipur High School, led people of his village in planting lakhs of mangrove saplings that now offer a dense forest cover for the village embankment.
Standing on the low mud embankment of Chargheri, overlooking the mangrove forest that the community has created, it is possible to hear the river, which, even 15 years ago, would angrily tear through the embankment and flood their village every time there was a severe cyclone. Now, the river is hard to spot through the mangrove trees. Red, yellow, and blue fiddler crabs scurry like jewels in the swamp at low tide. Snakes peep out of holes, birds flit overhead, and locals say that during the flowering season, it is impossible to stand for all the bees that cover the area.
The mangrove trees that Umashankar and the others planted were meant to protect the village by taking the edge off future cyclones—which they did when cyclones Amphan in 2020 and Yaas in 2021 struck the Sundarbans. Chargheri had then escaped major damage. Since the forest came up, the embankments have never been breached. That alone would have been enough for the villagers, but unknown to them, their forest has also become a rich carbon sink—a storehouse of carbon, a key contributor to climate change.
More than eight lakh mangrove trees now stretch beyond Chargheri to the other island villages of Satjelia, Gosaba, and Kumirmara, each of them a powerful blue carbon sink. Mangrove as carbon sink is being seen as one of the solutions to the climate crisis. In a paper published in 2022, Prof A K Paul from Vidyasagar University in Midnapore stated that the Blue Carbon Stock at four sites in Chargheri ranged from 214.72 to 280 mg per cubic centimetre.
Among all the natural systems, after seagrass, mangroves are the most efficient carbon trapping systems. The mangrove forest that Umashankar has created provides longevity to the village only as a co-benefit. The initiative’s advantage is the rapid carbon sequestration capacity of mangroves. Mangrove trees, which dominate the tidal belt, are particularly powerful in carbon capture. They absorb carbon from the atmosphere and deposit it in the soil, where the carbon can remain for thousands of years if undisturbed. Mangroves behave differently from other trees that also remove CO2 as part of the photosynthesis process—the latter store the carbon in their branches and roots but, when the tree dies, the carbon is released back into the air. Mangroves, on the other hand, transfer the carbon to the soil, where it stays unaffected even if the tree is destroyed. Researchers say that mangrove forests can remove 10 times more carbon from the air than other forests.
Mangroves have featured in climate conversations at high tables too. At CoP-27, held in Egypt last year, the Mangrove Alliance for Climate (MAC) was launched to unite countries, including India, “to scale up, accelerate conservation, restoration, and growing plantation efforts of mangrove ecosystems for the benefit of communities globally, and recognize the importance of these ecosystems for climate change mitigation and adaption”. In India, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented a new scheme in this year’s budget, called Mangrove Initiative for Shoreline Habitats and Tangible Incomes (MISHTI), to protect and revive mangrove ecosystems on the Indian coastline.
Source: indianexpress.com
