How a women-led initiative are trying to preserve new islands in Sunderbans

For every island that is washed away by rising tides in the Sundarbans, a new one is created somewhere else. A women-led initiative is making sure these newly-formed islands are preserved

Wading through knee-deep mud, a measuring tape and GPS-device in hand, Minoti Sil and Monika Misra erect poles two meters apart around a patch of tender mangroves. They are in the middle of a mudflat with another woman, Purnima Mishra, who takes out a slide caliper to measure the height and diameter of mangrove plants, which have grown in this block of mudflat over the past month.

Two other women look around for different varieties of plants, noting down their findings on a piece of paper. Then, the group moves on to the next block and repeats the whole process.

The women are part of a mangrove plantation project on a newborn mudflat that is slowly expanding into an island called Lakshmipur.

“The mudflat is like our baby. After the plantation drive, the population of crabs has increased in our village. We notice new varieties of birds that we once thought had become extinct. More importantly, even after heavy cyclones last year, the banks of our village didn’t break,” says Sil. 

Led by Nature Environment and Wildlife Society (NEWS), a non-governmental organisation supported by Livelihoods Funds, which helps rural communities in developing countries to restore their natural ecosystems, the project aims to restore and regenerate landmass through planting mangroves.

A group of 13 women from the village of Lakshmipur is now actively associated with the project. To incentivise locals to participate and make the  initiative sustainable, it focuses on livelihood creation and carbon credit accretion. Money generated from the carbon credits is shared with the local community if it exceeds the funding put toward the plantation-cum-livelihood drive.

Back home, the women from the mudflat feed the data they collected into a smartphone app. The width and height of the plant is used to analyse how much carbon dioxide the patch of mangroves can remove from the atmosphere. The app also helps monitor the growth of mangroves, an integral part of the plantation effort.

The varieties are recorded so the community can understand how suitable a particular species of mangrove is for a particular type of soil. Out of about 38 mangrove species, the NEWS project has planted about 17 across the Sundarbans. The women involved say they’ve already seen positive benefits.

“Earlier, with mild cyclones, our embankments would break and our homes drown. Ever since the mangroves have grown on the banks, the erosion has significantly reduced,” says Purnima Mishra.

In a region where tides are sweeping away land every day, the rise of a new island is a rarity, and the women at Lakshmipur say they’re determined to preserve it.

It was about 15 years ago that the mudflat started expanding, and soon people started to notice green shoots emerging. The state forest department quickly kicked off a plantation drive to help the mudflat grow and save it from erosion (the mangrove roots form a net that prevent sediment from washing away). The forest department also ensures that the place is protected from human intrusion through active policing by forest guards. The mudflat is now close to 1,000 hectares — and growing.

Erosion and accretion of land are intertwined. As the sea  removes land from Ghoramara, a fast-sinking island in the region, it is creating a new island at Lakshmipur where the sediments are being deposited, says Abhijit Mitra, a professor in the department of marine science at Calcutta University.

Over the past decade, at least three mudflats have emerged in the western  Sundarbans, says Jagdish Sana, a forest officer in the Kakdwip subdivision of the Sundarbans. But in the greater Sundarbans region, erosion has far exceeded accretion.

According to a 2002 study by Sugata Hazra, a professor at the school of oceanographic studies at Jadavpur University, total estimated erosion in the Sundarbans over roughly a 30-year span, estimated through a time series analysis between 1969 and 2001, was nearly 163 square kilometres, about the size of Washington DC.

Over the past five decades, at least four islands — Lohacara, Bedford, Kabasgadi and Suparibhanga — have been overtaken by rising sea levels. According to a 2010 study published by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), an estimated 6,000 families have been displaced because of the disappearance of these islands.

Erosion in the Sundarbans increased following cyclone Aila in 2009. The embankments broken by heavy winds from that storm remain broken today, subjecting coastal areas to a barrage of ferocious tides.

In places with thick mangrove cover, however, the destruction was less severe, says Ajanta Dey, joint secretary and project director at NEWS.

NEWS started the mangrove plantation drive to help recover from the destruction wrought by Aila and prevent a repeat in the future.

“Aila showed how climatic vulnerability can cause widespread devastation, and community resilience by way [of] mangrove plantation is the only way to withstand it,”

 Dey explains.

Her views are supported by a study by professor Mitra, who observed that after Aila land loss in parts of the Sundarbans with thick mangrove cover was 35 per cent less than that in areas without mangroves.

The plantation project at Lakshmipur mudflat is part of a bigger community-led mangrove plantation initiative NEWS runs in conjunction with livelihood generation efforts across the Sundarbans. Started in 2010, close to 300 women form the core group of this group are setting an example for communities across region, said Dey.
 

“We realised community ownership has to be the key for success for this project,” she says.

Hence, not only planting mangroves but also finding incentives for locals to participate in the project  is important. Those incentives include eco-friendly livelihood projects, such as organic agriculture, rain-water harvesting, culture fishing and artificial honey cultivation, among other income-generating activities.

Initial financial support for the project came from the Paris-based Danone Fund for Nature, a partnership between food and beverage multinational Danone, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the Ramsar Convention on the Wetlands. With close to Rs 10 crore of funding over roughly 10 years, the mangrove plantation across the Sundarbans has grown to cover more than 5,000 hectares. The project was later taken over by Livelihoods Funds, an offshoot of the Danone Fund for Nature.

Dey acknowledges that running the project hasn’t been without challenges, the biggest of which has been to keep the communities committed. Close to 2,000 hectares of mangroves plantation could not be sustained, as the communities opted out in the monitoring phase.

Securing initial funding was also a challenge because typically funding agencies seek tangible results in two to three years’ time, whereas the impact of the plantation project is measured over a longer term, Dey says.

It’s the unique ability of mangroves to “stitch the soil,” or hold it together, that Mitra believes make it the only long-term solution for combatting erosion.

“In close to 10 years, the impact of the plantation is perceptible,” says Dey. “For example, we see [in] places where embankments have been protected with mangroves, the impact of floods is much less. We see islands like Lakshmipur growing.”

And that growth is providing some relief to communities that have long lived in constant fear of displacement.

“Now, we live a life free of fear,” says Sil.