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Salinization of the Bangladesh Delta worsens economic precarity

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Abstract

Anthropogenic environmental changes are having complex effects on all aspects of the hydrological cycle. In estuarine areas, these factors are coalescing to increase saline contamination. Between 2006 and 2007, coastal Bangladesh experienced a sudden and dramatic increase in water salinity, with the saline front shifting inland by roughly 20km. We use this exceptional event to explore the impact of salinity on economic activity and agricultural production. Our results indicate that locations that experienced a sudden increase in water salinity incurred a 33% reduction in economic activity, as measured by nightlight intensity. This coincides with a decline in the cultivation of high-yielding rice varieties, which are not salt tolerant, as well as the removal of land from production. There is no robust evidence that changes in population drove these losses in economic activity. While sea level rise may be only one factor in this shift of the salinity front, our findings suggest that the future impacts of sea level rise have the potential to be quite large and may not be limited to coastline locations.

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Fig. 1
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Fig. 4

Data availability

All data are available to the public with the exception of the agricultural census data and water salinity data which are proprietary. The data and dofile used to analyze the impacts of the salinity front on nightlights, and the enhanced will be made available upon email request to the corresponding author.

Change history

  • 17 October 2022

    The original version of this paper was updated to correct the third and sixth affiliation addresses.

Notes

  1. Although this technique may seem less familiar to fields external to political science, this is now well-documented as an acceptable approach to pre-process data (Huntington-Klein, 2022).

  2. All models applying the pre-processed cross-sectional data from the agricultural census use weights produced from a separate entropy balancing procedure. It includes union-level EVI and nightlight intensity variables at baseline and the household-level total owned land variable provided by the agricultural census data to provide weights that enable the comparison and newly brackish groups to be more comparable in observable characteristics.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Mehrab Bakhtiar, M. Aminul Islam Khandaker, Wahid Quabili, and Glenn Sheriff for their technical support and feedback on the research.

Funding

Support from the National Science Foundation via the Belmont Forum/IGFA Program (ICER-1342644) is gratefully acknowledged.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics and IZA Institute of Labor Economics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Joyce Chen

  2. School of Politics and Global Studies and International Food Policy Research Institute, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Valerie Mueller

  3. LEGOS, Université de Toulouse, IRD, CNRS, CNES, UPS, Toulouse, France and Laboratório de Geoquímica, Instituto de Geociencias, Universidade de Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil

    Fabien Durand

  4. Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Erika Lisco

  5. School of Geographical Sciences, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

    Qing Zhong

  6. Indo-French Cell for Water Sciences, IRD-IISc, Bangalore, India and Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Hyderabad, India

    V. Raju Sherin

  7. Institute of Water and Flood Management, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh

    A. K. M. Saiful Islam

Authors
  1. Joyce Chen
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Contributions

J.C. and V.M. designed the evaluation and wrote the paper with feedback from F.D. E.L, and V.M., and Q.Z. were involved in constructing the georeferenced and socioeconomic variables included in the datasets used in the analysis. V.M. performed all statistical analysis and created all displays of results, except Figs. 1b and 2 which were developed by F.D. and E.L., respectively. V.R.S, F.D, and A.S.I. developed the salinity dataset.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Valerie Mueller.

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Chen, J., Mueller, V., Durand, F. et al. Salinization of the Bangladesh Delta worsens economic precarity. Popul Environ 44, 226–247 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-022-00411-2

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