Land Cover Change, Population Dynamics and Climate Change: Spatial and Chronological Transformation of Sundarbans and its Adjacent Areas, Bangladesh

Abstract

S ndarbans is the largest mangrove forest of the world. It covers an area of around 10,000 km of which 62% lies in the districts of Bagerhat, Satkhira and Khulna of Bangladesh and the rest 38% shared by India. The Sundarbans mangrove forest of Bangladesh constitute around 50% of the country's protected area and around 2 million people of the Sundarbans impact Zone (SIZ) are directly and indirectly depends on Sundarbans and its resources. The forest is under threats because of population pressure, human encroachment, shrimp farming crab farming, frontier agriculture, pollution, natural disasters e.g. cyclones, coastal erison storms surges, floods, hydrological changes, sea level rise, and above all lack of awareness etc. This paper examines the population dynamics of Sundarbans Impact Zone from 1974 to 2011; climate change impact on Sundarbans; and land cover changes of .Sundarbans from 1973 to 2010. A strong relationship has found between population pressers and a decrease of vegetated land cover from the Sundarbans Reserved Forest. The population size of SIZ increased by 20 percent (between 1981 and 1991) where as the number of trees per hectare in SRF has decreased by 25% (between 1983 and 1996). During 1973 to 2010, water bodies, barren land and vegetated land decreased by 7%, 50% and 16% respectively; whereas the grassland increased by 228% during the same period.this indicates that the density of evergreen vegetation and its canopy closure has decreased. Climate change put another set of impact on Sundarbans through increasing salinity regime of SRF and decreasing economically valuable species from the Sundarbans. Thus the vicious cycle of population growth and climate change impact on Sundarbans is playing an important role to the depletion of Sundarbans resources. The recommendations of this paper includes in-depth understanding of population dynamics of SIZ locality, develop GIS and remote sensing based real time monitoring system, comprehensive protection implicit political commitment, environmental friendly development flow augmentation from Farakka barrage, creating alternative livelihoods for Sundarbans dependent communities, and above all, ensuring transparency accountability and awareness of community people and forest managers to conserve the Sundarbans from human interventions.