What Climate Change Means for the Bay of Bengal, With Sarang Shidore

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is, what climate change means for the Bay of Bengal region.

 

Today's episode is the fourth in a special series of episodes on The President's Inbox that look at how climate change is affecting life, society and conflict in different regions around the world. A generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York has made this series possible. With me to discuss how climate change is affecting people living in the Bay of Bengal region is Sarang Shidore. Sarang is a director of studies and a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also a senior non-resident fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks. He recently wrote a discussion paper for CFR's Center for Preventive Action titled Climate Change and Instability in the Bay of Bengal Region.

 

Sarang, thank you for joining me.

 

SHIDORE:
Thank you very much for having me.

 

LINDSAY:
If I may, Sarang, I'd like to begin with sort of the big geographical question, 'cause I'm not sure how many people really know that much about the countries in the Bay of Bengal or what their makeup is, size and the rest. So can you give us sort of a primer on the Bay Bengal region?

 

SHIDORE:
Right. So the Bay of Bengal region forms a sort of a... It is a sea, it is a large body of water that lies in the northern part of the Indian Ocean. So you can sort of say that it's part of the Indian Ocean, but it's its own distinct maritime space because it is enclosed by a number of countries. So it's west, north and east. And these include India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, and also Sri Lanka in the south. And then just a little bit tip of Indonesia also. That's the Bay of Bengal. So you have quite a few countries, but the main larger ones are India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Thailand.

 

LINDSAY:
So this is where South Asia essentially meets Southeast Asia.

 

SHIDORE:
That's exactly right. The first two countries I mentioned, India and Bangladesh, are part of South Asia, and Myanmar and Thailand are a part of Southeast Asia.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay. And we talk about populations in these countries. India, obviously the world's most populous country now with population around 1.4 billion. What are the rough sizes of the populations of Bangladesh, Thailand, and Myanmar?

 

SHIDORE:
Bangladesh is the second-largest country but it's a lot smaller than India. So in India we are talking now, India is the biggest country in the world in terms of population. It has overtaken China this year, according to the UN. Bangladesh is somewhere in the region of 160 million. So that's still a very large country, that's about half the population we have here at home in the United States.

 

LINDSAY:
Certainly bigger than Canada or Britain or Germany or France, countries I suspect many people are familiar with.

 

SHIDORE:
Absolutely. It's double the population of Germany, for example. So it's actually a very large country. And then you have Myanmar and Thailand that are more in the 50 to 70 million people range. So they're still large countries, and these would be a large country in Europe if Thailand were situated in Europe. So all of them are really significant from that standpoint.

 

LINDSAY:
And these countries are also home to some very large cities. Obviously on the eastern coast of India you have Kolkata, which used to be called Calcutta, but I was surprised actually to read that Yangon in Myanmar has a population estimated to be something on the order of 23 million people.

 

SHIDORE:
Yeah. These large cities in what's called developing Asia by many international agencies, these are really agglomerations. So we are talking of a city court, the official limits of the city that might be... Even that's large, that might be 7, 8, 10 million. But then you have this hinterland of the city, which really is a part of the economy of the city. The best comparison is something like the New York, New Jersey kind of agglomerations.

 

LINDSAY:
Like the metropolitan area.

 

SHIDORE:
Right, exactly. So from that standpoint we are talking of populations of... For example, Dhaka in Bangladesh has, again, upwards of 20 million people. And you have Yangon in Myanmar, you have Bangkok in Thailand. And in India you have two very large cities, Kolkata and Chennai, which is further south. And there are also other cities, but these two others are the big megacities on the coast of the Bay of Bengal.

 

LINDSAY:
Okay, so we have these megacities. Can you give us a sense of the topography? And when I look at Bangladesh my impression is that it's at the confluence of several different rivers. I think it's described as the world's largest river delta system. Just give us some sense on that score.

 

SHIDORE:
Bangladesh is a very low-lying country, except for the extreme north where you do have some hills in Sylhet and a couple of other places, Chittagong Hills in the east. But most of the country is very low-lying, very flat. As you correctly said, there's a huge river system that originates in Tibet or in India, and then ends up in Bangladesh and empties the waters into the Bay of Bengal.

 

So as you can imagine, these massive rivers, and they really are massive. We are talking of many, many kilometers wide in terms of their breadth, in the delta especially they're massive. And of course during the monsoon season they get even bigger. So you can see that all of this is basically a set up in Bangladesh for potential excess water, otherwise known as floods. The same is true in parts of India. If you go to west Bengal in India you again have low-lying land and a river that empties itself. As you go further south in India you get potentially river deltas but also some drier areas. But all of them, almost all of them, are densely inhabited. And the same is true for Thailand and Myanmar. So you have a lot of populations residing close to the coast or right on the coast that depend, in terms of their livelihood, on the coast.

 

LINDSAY:
Well let's talk about climate change, Sarang, and the threat it poses to the countries in the Bay of Bengal. What are the risks they face?

 

SHIDORE:
Climate change of course is a phenomenon that we are all facing, including here in the U.S. And South Asia, Southeast Asia, both of the regions are no different. Now the interesting thing about the Bay of Bengal is that, not all of it, but very large parts of it suffer from cyclones, which are called hurricanes in our part of the world here. And these cyclones can be very, very intense. The Bay of Bengal is among the most cyclone-prone regions in the world, and these cyclones have historically taken a massive number of lives. Now we know that climate change acts to make cyclones more intense, and that indeed is happening in the Bay of Bengal as well. We are seeing cyclones, the frequency may not increase too much, but the intensity of these cyclones, the amount of rain that they dump over a certain area, they tend to move slower and so forth, can really be much more damaging because of climate change.

 

Apart from cyclones there's also the feature of rainfall. Now the region has what's called a monsoon season, which starts, depending on where you are, in May and extends all the way through September. That's where most of the rain falls in most of the Bay of Bengal region. But with climate change you're seeing more extremes. So actually you will get also more net rainfall in South Asia, at least. But more interesting and more important is that the rainfall will come in shorter stretches of time. So you get very intense days of rainfall and then many days when there's no rain, unlike say fifty years ago when there used to be a more uniform distribution of rain. So again, you can see that more intense periods of rain are not necessarily a good thing in terms of the impact they cause.

 

LINDSAY:
So that raises the possibility you get drought or you get stretches in which you're not getting rainfall when you need it for agriculture. And these are countries in which a very large chunk of the population is involved in subsistence farming, correct?

 

SHIDORE:
Absolutely. Rain-fed agriculture, that is farmers depending on rain rather than artificial irrigation, is a big chunk of the population across the region. And when you do have these intense rainfalls two things happen, because climate change is causing them to be more intense, as I just said. And what happens is, for one, the rainfall causes floods because often the cities and towns are not built to cope that much of rain in such a short time. So that's one aspect. The other aspect is also that rainfall falling more intensely causes runoffs of the topsoil and nutrients and so forth. So it damages potential agricultural yield going forward, which is also not a good thing. And the third thing, as you mentioned, is there can be significant dry spells. And if there is a crop that depends on a more regular pattern of rain through the monsoon then that, again, will suffer in terms of its yield.

 

LINDSAY:
Let's talk about the threat to Bay of Bengal countries given the risk of rising sea levels. I have read that there are projections that substantial parts of Bangkok, for example, could be underwater as soon as 2050.

 

SHIDORE:
That's the other threat from climate change because of two reasons. One is that we have rising temperatures that expand the sea water that's currently in the ocean. And the other driver is the fact that, as the planet is getting warmer, you are seeing glaciers melting. Glaciers in the Antarctic, the Arctic, but also in Tibet, which is sort of called the third pole, which has a huge amount of ice locked up there. Those glaciers in the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau are starting to melt in an irreversible manner. So all this water has to go somewhere and it ends up in the sea and oceans. And of course the Bay of Bengal is a part of that.

 

We don't know how much sea level rise we are going to precisely see by 2050. It depends, of course, on what we do in terms of mitigating carbon emissions in the next thirty years. But if you take the little more pessimistic scenarios, not the worst case but on the more pessimistic side, or even the median scenarios, we are going to see substantial increases in sea level rise by the middle of the century, maybe half a meter, maybe more. By the end of the century we may get one meter sea level rise. The exact local effects depend on where you are on the planet.

 

But Bangkok is, as you rightly said, one of the most threatened cities in the Bay of Bengal region, and it's a very important, bustling, economically dynamic metropolis. So this has implications that... We can talk about this later, but the region, Thailand generally also has significant supply chains of manufacturing goods that we here in the U.S. depend on. So this has some impacts for our economy as well.

 

And then other cities like Dhaka or Kolkata, although they're not right on the coast, nevertheless sea level rise has damaging impacts in terms of how much salinity enters the water system near the other coast, and the overall challenges that those cities face from the massive rivers that are of course connected to the sea as well.

 

LINDSAY:
One other risk of climate change I'd like to discuss with you, Sarang, is extreme heat or heat stress. How is that playing out in the Bay of Bengal?

 

SHIDORE:
So these are hot countries in the summers that tend to be... The hottest months tend to be March, April and May. Temperatures can be very high, certainly above 100 Fahrenheit. And the other aspect is that a lot of the labor in these countries works outdoors. So we have farmers, we have in the cities increasingly construction sites because these are generally, except for Myanmar which is going through a very difficult time, but the other three countries are generally economically growing countries. They have economies that are doing relatively well or growing.

 

So the cities are growing and there's a lot of migrant labor that comes from the villages, works on these construction sites throughout the day. And heat as we know, combined with high humidity can be even fatal. So we are talking of, as we get these super heat waves that we've seen, we just had one in... I think it's still going on in Texas, we will have those heat waves in the region, that can be almost guaranteed. And many of these workers are very vulnerable to disease, severe shock and potentially death. So absolutely...

 

The timescale of climate change is not slow enough so that most of these workers, farmers are going to be in air-conditioned homes by the time you get the heat waves, which are really already beginning, the heat waves. I mean, it's not like we're talking of ten years from now, they're here now and then ten years from now they'll be significantly worse.

 

LINDSAY:
I think a lot of people have been hearing about or are going to hear about the so-called wet-bulb temperature for people, that is a certain temperature and humidity level, the body's natural way of cooling, which is by perspiring, won't keep you cool, which can lead to heat stroke and death, which is a major challenge.

 

SHIDORE:
That's right.

 

LINDSAY:
Again, not just in the Bay of Bengal. So what is the capacity for countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand and India to adapt to the consequences of climate change? And I ask that against the backdrop of two things, Sarang. One is that it's pretty clear that climate is changing and hopes for rapid reduction in the emission of heat trapping gases aren't going to be realized. But also these countries to some extent have had success adapting to natural weather systems in the past. I'm struck with the success that Bangladesh in particular has had over the years in reducing the number of fatalities from the cyclones you described earlier. There were cyclones in the past where the death toll exceeded a hundred thousand, but through a lot of changes enacted by national and local governments that death toll has come down. So give me a sense of how likely these countries can adapt to the changes they're seeing coming down the road?

 

SHIDORE:
The Bay of Bengal region is a story in many ways, there are negative headlines that you get from the region. But it's also a story of optimism because, as you said, some of these countries have actually done very well in terms of adapting to disasters that have actually historically not been so much fueled by climate change. They are being fueled more now, but we've had disasters for decades and centuries in the region. And Bangladesh is really the standout star in all of this.

 

I mean, just to give you some numbers here, we had a category four hurricane in 1970 Bangladesh, which was called Cyclone Bhola, and it came at a very difficult time in the country because there was a very deep civil uprising, a very strong one against... It was a part of Pakistan at the time, it was called East Pakistan. And there was a very severe conflict growing between East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh, and West Pakistan, which is now just called Pakistan, because of a number of reasons. And during this time of great instability and political conflict arrives a cyclone, and we don't even know how many people exactly died in that but the estimates are half a million. It is probably the worst cyclone disaster that we know of in terms of recorded history.

 

So we are talking of really massive loss of life and homes and all the rest, livelihoods. Then you fast-forward to 2007 when you had a similar cyclone, category four, Sidr. And you already see the death toll down to less than 4,000. And mind you, the population of the country has grown significantly since 1970, so as a fraction it's even lower. So we are seeing already a very large reduction. But then you fast-forward to 2020, which is just yesterday, right, during period of COVID in fact, when you had cyclone Amphan, also a category four cyclone in Bangladesh and India. And that led to a death total of less than thirty people in Bangladesh.

 

So we are seeing orders of magnitude reduction with time, to the point where today the country has set up such a well-functioning system, the early warning evacuation from threatened areas, cyclone shelters, embankments to protect coastal communities and so forth, that Bangladeshi policymakers talk now about losses of livelihoods and physical infrastructure, no longer so much about the loss of life. And you see similar things also in India. Indian states, especially Odisha and Tamil Nadu, we have seen also very large reductions of death from such disasters.

 

Now this doesn't mean that people aren't suffering from climate change because climate change comes in two forms. One is these extreme weather events which get the headlines, but there's also slow onset events like falling yield of rice in Thailand for example. Thailand is a big rice exporter, one of the biggest rice exporters in the world, huge farming population. We know that over time rice yields are going to fall in Thailand, and that happens without any headlines.

 

So it's not just enough to plan against these extreme weather events, which I think countries there... Except Myanmar, again, Myanmar is in the grip of a very bad civil war, but the other countries are making real rapid progress. It's really dealing with the slow onset changes, the subsidence of land, the migration that comes from it, the drought and the heat waves. These are the areas where I think more attention now is being paid on. And the question is really, can these countries show the same kind of pace of improvements on human security that they have so far on, say, cyclones in time? Because climate change is a relentless thing and we have only a limited time horizon to get this right.

 

LINDSAY:
So Sarang, how would you assess the chances that these countries are in fact going be able to get it right, that they'll be able to replicate their success against high death tolls from acute weather events?

 

SHIDORE:
Part of the answer depends on how much carbon we emit into the atmosphere. Because if we don't get our mitigation game in order, and here this really is not about the countries except India, which is a significant emitter. The rest of the countries really don't emit very much. It's down to India, but even more it's down to China and the United States and India second, and Europe. These are the big four, along with Russia, Brazil and Indonesia, where you have major energy emissions or deforestation. So it's sort of the big seven or eight of climate emissions that have to get their act together.

 

If you get that right, if you get that as fast as the IPCC, which is the UN body, the scientific body that issues its reports on where we are at in the climate cycle, if we do that then there is a chance for these countries to manage the crisis. If we stay within 1.5 Celsius, which is looking challenging to be honest, I think these countries will be able to get a handle on it. I'm not saying there will not be losses of life and there will not be pain and economic harm. Except for Myanmar. Again, Myanmar is a sui generis case just because of its political situation. The others I believe can. Now if we get to two Celsius and above and we are not able to limit emissions, then it becomes a much more gray area and an open question.

 

LINDSAY:
I take your point, Sarang, that the countries we're talking about, particularly Myanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh, are not the ones that are driving the emission of heat-trapping gases but they're going to be perhaps the biggest victims of these heat-trapping gases. I will note that the average resident of Bangladesh produces one-thirtieth the amount of carbon dioxide in equivalence than the average resident of the United States. And there are grave concerns about the ability of the world to keep global climate change to the 1.5 degrees Celsius target. So I'm wondering on that score, is there more that can be done on the multilateral front to help countries in the Bay of Bengal address the challenges that we're pretty sure they're going to be facing?

 

SHIDORE:
Absolutely. I think this is really a urgent issue for the global community and the United States. Understanding that many of these countries are in important zones, I mean, South Asia, Southeast Asia, both are strategically significant for the U.S. And even from a humanitarian perspective, we are talking of 2 billion people or more in the region. There has to be a global effort to help these countries adapt to climate change to the extent they can, and to the extent that they cannot because of global temperatures just perhaps not being under control in the way we would like.

 

There's also the issue of what's called loss and damage. There's a fund set up if you follow the climate negotiations under the UNFCCC, the conference of parties to the COP negotiations. The last one did agree to set up a fund. Now that fund has not been seeded yet, and even that funding for adaptation is still well below what it should be. More money is going towards mitigation. So we need low interest or what's called concessional finance, and even outright grants for countries that are what's called the poorest, the least developed countries. And they happen to be in South, Southeast Asia and Africa, most of them. And that's really a global responsibility of all major powers, and certainly the United States is the globally most significant player.

 

LINDSAY:
Sarang, how significant have the U.S. efforts on this front been? Are we seeing a lot of action coming out of Washington or is the case of more rhetoric than reality?

 

SHIDORE:
So I think Washington of late has been doing very well, given the circumstances on when it comes to domestic climate policy. I think the Inflation Reduction Act, which was named because of exigencies but really is a climate and energy bill for the most part, I think has really opened the doors for significant reductions of U.S. emissions by 2030, as President Biden has laid out. And he's very sincere in those goals, I think. The problem is that, whereas domestic action is very important in the U.S. because the U.S. is a big emitter, the problem is when the president or the administration wishes to do more on the foreign policy front it runs into bigger headwinds of domestic politics.

 

And so for example, President Biden's commitment to fund $11 billion for international climate efforts has not been met, is not even close at this point. There was a recent announcement of $1 billion more, but we are still far from that target, which is by the way, not a massive target. It's a relatively modest target. So we need the U.S. political system, and indeed those of other wealthy countries, to step up more and meet those international commitment under... There are many funding routes. I mean, one can take their pick of the funds or mechanisms that one is most comfortable with. But there's no substitute for actually walking the talk on that now. The time has come, and I just hope that the U.S. political system gets its act on that in the coming couple of years.

 

LINDSAY:
Let me ask you, Sarang, about the rising power of China. Are we seeing the Chinese invest in these sort of efforts to help countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, to be able to adapt to what looks to be inevitable climate change? I note that China has its big Belt and Road Initiative which has led to funding around the world. I understand that those funding levels have come down in recent years. Any sense that the Chinese are playing a positive role on the issues you described?

 

SHIDORE:
China could do more on this. Now of course, China is a newcomer to the international aid scene. In fact it tends to focus more on investments abroad in commercial terms, which is fine. But when it comes to elaborate international aid the Chinese are still getting into it. Now they do have arrangements with ASEAN, which is the body that combines ten Southeast Asian states, starting from Myanmar all the way to Indonesia and the Philippines. And they have made some commitments on helping what's called the AHA center in Jakarta, which is the ASEAN's Disaster Relief Humanitarian Assistance Center, which is actually quite well-equipped and does a good job. So the Chinese have signed agreements, they have made financial commitments, and they have also participated in certain disaster efforts. There are sensitivities to Chinese presence in these situations, Chinese teams being present in these countries. But nevertheless, people also want... I think governments in the region for the most part, most of them do want China to step up on that.

 

So China could do more. It has tremendous capacity to help, it has all the lift power and also deeper pockets. And so do we in the U.S.. So I guess what I'm driving towards here is that both countries as major players in the region, both are Asian powers, the U.S. is a Asian power too, have a responsibility to not just do their thing on their own, but perhaps also cooperate in this effort in the region. Either bilaterally, which may be challenging, but then utilize regional organizations and platforms which are perhaps politically more possible, in concert with other states in the region, to lend a helping hand. That indeed this is in the national interest, because a more stable region that doesn't see massive outflows of refugees or doesn't see severe economic damage is good for opportunities.

 

And remember, these are growing except for Myanmar, which would be growing but for the civil war. But these are growing countries with markets and opportunities for American business. So there are a lot of reasons why the U.S. should be there and China should be there and why they should do it even sometimes together.

 

LINDSAY:
Sarang, you mentioned conflict. We've talked about Myanmar obviously has had a rebellion against the central government, but conflict is not unknown in the other countries we're discussing. Are you worried that we're going to see, as climate change proceeds, an increase in political conflict in countries as different groups or classes square off against one another? Or are you more worried about flows of people? That is, people basically moving somewhere where they can live and they can survive.

 

SHIDORE:
So the science on climate and conflict is complex. There isn't this simplistic one-to-one correspondence, that you have a big cyclone in a community and a civil war breaks out. That's not at all the case. In fact you can also get solidarity in a disaster zone. So we should be very careful when we talk about this concept called climate security.

 

However we can say a few things. Now the research has advanced to tell us two things at least, or perhaps more actually. But the first thing is the fact that if you have preexisting armed conflict and you have the effects of climate change, that increases climate vulnerability in the region. So armed conflict increases the distress, let's say out migration, other forms of destabilizing phenomenon that climate change would visit upon that region. So that's one causality that's relatively well established.

 

The other way around is much more complex, because between climate impact, which is bad, and most of these impacts are bad, and the emergence of conflict or protests or similar sorts of phenomena, you have a huge space, a.k.a., the government, governance institutions, regional roles...

 

LINDSAY:
A lot of intermediary factors.

 

SHIDORE:
Exactly, intermediary factors that intervene between a bad climate event and, at the other end of the spectrum, a bad political violent event. So the mediation is through so many layers that, in a way, that's an opportunity. That tells you that these are the layers that we have control, because we have control over... We have maybe less control over climate change, at least some of it is already baked in. But we do have control over all these other factors.

 

So there's an opportunity here to shape them so that we don't get the potential of increased social cleavages, potential of citizen dissatisfaction with governments, the potential of projects being built unilaterally to meet climate hazards that then cause problems on the other side of the border. For example, the big Chinese dam on the Great Bend River in Tibet, which is not quite on the Bay of Bengal but it's broadly in Asia, is driven by climate considerations, is causing a lot of distrust in India across the border because there hasn't been the kind of consultation that is necessary.

 

In a way these are all climate security phenomena. These are emerging from climate or as responses to it, but in an environment where there is trust and there are organizations and institutions, we can manage it. If we don't have those institutions then we may be in some trouble.

 

LINDSAY:
On what I take to be an upbeat and optimistic note I am going to close The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Sarang Shidore, the director of studies and a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Sarang, thank you very much for joining me.

 

SHIDORE:
Thank you so much for having me.

 

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen, and leave us a review. We love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

 

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks out to Michelle Kurilla for her assistance. This is Jim Lindsay, thanks for listening.