“I grew up knowing my country was drowning” – says Anushay of Bangladesh with a sense of despair.

Bangladesh is one of the world’s worst victims to the negative impacts of anticipated climate change and is possibly most threatened by it. Though the country’s contribution to the global greenhouse emission is low, floods and other natural disasters are becoming very frequent. Its vulnerability lies in its geographic location and a very convoluted coast line. The high population density adds to the misery.

 The cause and effect relationship between disaster and socio-economic development is important, as  floods cause a lot of direct as well as indirect loss to the country’s economy.  Each year almost 18% of the country gets flooded and when severe almost 55% of the country is inundated.  90% of the water of South Asia passes through Bangladesh. The major rivers of the country are the Ganga, Brahmaputra, Padma and the lower Meghna.

Floodplains constitute about four-fifth of the land mass of Bangladesh and 68% of the land is vulnerable to floods. The country experiences three kinds of floods. There are the monsoon floods caused by heavy downpour during the rainy season. The change in the base level of rivers causes tidal surge floods. This is due to the rise of the local sea level and subsidence. Lastly, the flash floods that are caused by heavy rain associated with storms or hurricanes. Jamuna and Ganga define the eastern and southern boundary of the North West region and is bordered by several other rivers too. The intensity of flash floods is very high here.  

 Developing a sustainable insurance for a flood prone region is difficult but catastrophic floods which are rarer can be insured.  CIRM in collaboration with Institute of Water Modeling- Bangladesh and Oxfam- Great Britain is developing an index based Meso level flood insurance product for Sirajganj district located in the northwest region of Bangladesh.  IWM has developed a model that will assess the hazards caused due to catastrophic floods. The Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre (FFWC) Model was taken as the base model for the study. The Monsoon period of 2007 was considered as the base period for model development and calibration.

The “Flood Hazard Model” which will give us the scenario on flooding in Sirajganj district has been developed using the Digital Elevation Model (DEM). DEM will be represented on a 300×300metres grid. The grids will represent the amount of floods each region experiences. Other models such as MIKE 11, MIKE GIS and MIKE 11 HD will also be used.  A flood vulnerability index in terms of flood depth and duration is   prepared to produce the index base flood insurance.

The economic loss arising out of the flood will be estimated by CIRM. Pragati is the insurer, but the reinsurers are yet to be finalised. The pilot study will be done in 2011 and hopefully the misery of the people suffering due to catastrophes like floods will be reduced.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Catastrophe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.