THE first hint is often a taste — tea brewed with brackish water, a sting on the tongue after a long walk home from the embankment. In Khulna, Satkhira and Barguna, families now measure seasons not only by rain and harvest but also by the creeping line where salt replaces sweet. Bangladesh’s coast, once buffered by mangroves and silt-heavy rivers, is becoming the front line of a distinctly twenty-first-century struggle: how to live, and thrive, as seas rise, storms intensify and freshwater recedes.
This is no abstract threat. When Cyclone Remal roared ashore in May 2024, authorities issued great danger signals and evacuated nearly 800,000 people into 9,000 shelters across 19 districts. Even with one of the world’s most effective warning and shelter systems, the storm damaged over 170,000 houses and inundated farmland already stressed by a dry season of salinity. Each surge now pushes brine deeper into soil and ponds, turning last season’s safety into this season’s scarcity.
The science explains why the taste of salt is harder to ignore. Tide gauges and satellite records show sea levels along parts of the delta rising by about five millimetres a year — tiny increments with huge consequences for low-lying land. New studies reveal how even modest sea-level rise reorganises salinity across the Bengal delta, with western districts hit hardest as tidal energy collides with reduced upstream flows. For villagers dependent on shallow tubewells and ponds, this shift is not an academic map but a daily choice of what to drink, what to plant and whether to migrate.
The human toll is mounting. In Dacope and other coastal upazilas, doctors warn that saline drinking water correlates with hypertension, pregnancy complications and kidney disease — an added burden on top of longstanding arsenic exposure. Women, who shoulder the task of collecting water, are hit hardest. This is what climate change looks like in a kitchen and a clinic: invisible salts raising blood pressure while a cyclone rips off the roof.
Bangladesh has not ignored the problem. The Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 recognised years ago that erosion, sediment and salinity are inseparable from storm risk. The plan, backed by the Mujib Climate Prosperity agenda, outlines a layered approach: smarter embankments in dense areas, restored canals to drain waterlogged polders, and mangrove belts to blunt storm waves. Where these elements align, risks fall. Where sluice gates clog, canals silt and embankments collapse, communities fall into a cycle of flooding, waterlogging and brine.
Execution, though, is uneven. The first phase of the Coastal Embankment Improvement Project taught lessons about building higher and stronger dykes that account for land subsidence and sea-level rise, reinforced with geotextiles and local stewardship. Follow-on investments are expanding multi-purpose cyclone shelters that double as schools and climate-proofing access roads so aid and evacuation are not stranded in floodwaters. The goal is not just higher walls but smarter systems that keep people, goods and freshwater moving before, during and after a storm.
At the village scale, adaptation often looks ingenious. Rainwater harvesting tanks and pond-sand filters provide seasonal lifelines. Managed aquifer recharge pilots store monsoon water underground for the dry months. Farmers are experimenting with salt-tolerant rice and pulses, shifting to brackish fish where paddy fails, and using topsoil salinity maps to plan cropping. These local shifts are most effective when backed by broader support: reliable early warnings, transparent water management, and enforcement against industrial effluents that poison stressed rivers.
Yet the politics of freshwater may define everything. Dry-season flows from upstream determine how far salt can penetrate inland. As treaties approach revision and long-stalled agreements linger, Bangladesh needs basin-wide cooperation — data sharing, co-managed barrages, and sediment strategies to keep rivers alive. Without predictable upstream flows, even the best embankment or recharge system becomes a holding action against an advancing tide.
Still, there is momentum to build on. The same preparedness that empties villages into cyclone shelters overnight can be used for anticipatory action—unlocking cash or aid before peak surges hit. The same engineering capacity that builds embankments can also clear canals and reconnect rivers to floodplains, letting mangroves regrow and farms drain. The same digital tools that warn of landfall can power salinity dashboards for farmers and health workers.
Bangladesh has repeatedly turned disaster into hard-won knowledge. Cyclone deaths have been slashed by orders of magnitude through warnings, shelters and drills. The coastal struggle can bend again in our favour, but it will require patient maintenance, steady financing and honesty about where land must be surrendered so the rest can endure. Climate change will keep pushing salt on the wind. Our task is to meet it with embankments stitched to mangroves, shelters stitched to schools, and plans stitched to the lived maps of those who know every bend and breach of the coast. The test, as always, will come in a glass of water.
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Dr Makhan Lal Dutta is an agricultural engineer and chairperson and CEO of Harvesting Knowledge Consultancy.
