The Sea

Myanmar reels: Cyclone Nargis, the Irrawaddy Delta and Natural Protection

May 6th, 2008

All of us share the pain of everyday people in Myanmar who have just suffered enormous loss in this natural disaster. They are the bewildered and increasingly vulnerable. Government policies have made it hard for us to connect to Myanmar, to imagine its landscape and its people, and especially those in the hardest hit area of the Irrawaddy Delta. As a marine and coastal scientists who has worked in that region and after the SE Asia tsunami, I thought I’d share a little knowledge of this place with you.

ANOTHER DEVASTATED DELTA
Just like the marshes of the Mississippi Delta took the brunt of Katrina, so the Irrawaddy Delta of Myanmar took the force of Cyclone Nargis. Covering an area of three and a half million hectares the Irrawaddy Delta is twice as big as its vast Mississippi counterpart. Just like its sister river the Great Muddy, the Grand Irrawaddy River carries sediments and silt to the ocean, creating marshlands, offshore barrier islands, fertile flood plains, and a bountiful sea. Tidal influences extend over 100 miles inland. There may not be jazz here, but this is the deep south of Myanmar, and it knows the blues. Six million people live on the Irrawaddy plain. All of them were exposed to the storm surges and winds of the Cyclone. Most of them didn’t even know it was coming.

A DELTA DEFORMED
Ironically it was British foreign policy and engineering that first led so many people onto the Delta. Beginning in 1850 and continuing vigorously into the twentieth century, the British transformed this wilderness into rice paddies. Their efforts resulted in one of the largest landuse transformations of the time, and the migration of thousands of people driven to survive. Levees and dykes were constructed. Today there are 1,300 km of embankments that protect 600,000 ha of rice paddy. The upper Delta has become the Rice Bowl of Asia and currently produces 40% of Myanmar’s total crop. But over the years many of the flood protection structures have not been adequately maintained, and the community has remained vulnerable to the forces of nature.

The lower half of the Delta has almost no topography. A mosaic of settled communities, temporary camps, and channels, it resembles a closeup of a Chuck Close painting. Down here, everything happens by water, and practically every household owns a boat. This is fishing and aquaculture country. Local or commercial fisheries use every navigable stream and river. Operating from either small dugouts with outboards, or commercial trawlers, they ply these waters to access a rich catch including prawns, mackerel, and anchovies. The delta is rich in shad Hilsa ilishka a favorite fish in Burma and in the export trade. Almost half a million hectacres is below high spring tide level. And for centuries this low-lying carpet was guarded by a natural fortress. Dense mangrove forests protected communities and wildlife that lived among the marshes. The same mangroves provided critical nursery grounds for commercial fish species including prawns. But Myanmar’s mangroves have been disappearing so fast that some scientists estimate that within 50 years all them will have gone. With the exception of some reserve areas almost every mangrove has already been cut down for agriculture conversion.

PEOPLE AND NATURE LEFT VULNERABLE
Local and international individuals and organizations have long recognized the importance of humans relationship with nature, and understood the natural vulnerability of this place to storm surges and cyclones. But today’s Irrawaddy Delta is no longer a place of humans and nature in harmony. Intense pressures from people who live on the edge of an ever-shrinking resource have upped pressure. The river terrapin (Bagur baska) is now highly endangered- when not so long ago 70,000 terrapin eggs were harvested each year. Sea turtles are caught and killed in nets, and hawksbills (Eretmochelys imbricata) are actively hunted for their shells. The southern delta was the last outpost of the Estuarine crocodile Crocodylus porosus. But its numbers have been declining from egg collection (for food), habitat destruction, hunting, and entaglement in nets. The Delta remains a key habitat for a variety of waterfowl, although these too have declined dramatically over the past 100 years, The Spot-billed pelican once nested in thousands here but disappeared completely as a result of conversion of marshland to rice paddies.

This flat, vulnerable, densely populated, beautiful and messy Delta took the brunt of Cyclone Nargis that beat on it with winds of up to 121 mph. Storm surges in excess of 12 feet swept over the Delta. Seawater roared and funneled up the thousands of channels that criss-cross the marshes, in exactly the same way that they surged up channels in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast with devastating consequences.
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More images at the end of this piece

The Damage

The damage is huge. Every hour the death toll increases. It will never be fully known. Some were never censused in life, they will not now be recorded in death.
Down in the delta, we can be sure that mangrove destruction exacerbated the tragic loss of human life and property, People had no protection and nowhere to run when the waters hit. The SE Asia tsunami showed us the benefit of mangroves and coastal habitats in saving lives and property. We also learned that those communities with intact ecosystems and natural resources are more resilient and able to rebound faster from disaster.

Ironically the rice crop has been wiped out. And the timing couldn’t have been worse. With a major rice and food shortage sweeping the region, Myanmar will be competing on a world stage for access to this staple. The consequences of this have not yet even begun to be realized.

What can we expect?
Nature and people suffer together. In the tsunami we saw that those who depended most on nature but had damaged their natural resources fared worse. Many who were able to feed their families before the tragedy were left with, literally, no food, and no way to make a living. The poorest, most isolated, suffer most and often received the least. In Myanmar, entire villages, ports and fishing boats, are gone. Worse, the environmental damage suffered in the delta will make it harder for aid workers to help those stranded there. As aid workers after Katrina realized, and just as I and others did in Asia, slogging through choked marshes is nearly impossible, and navigating by boats often out of the question.

What can we do?
As I write this, it is still unclear whether and how much aid will be accepted by the Myanmar government. We can only hope that they will be as compassionate to the needs of their people, as the rest of the world is ready to be. Our first priority has to be the safety and security of those victims of the cyclone. After that rebuilding is a must. We don’t have to repeat the mistakes of the past. Using established tools and methods developed in the USA and internationally for emergency response we can mount a broader environmental response. For instance, based on our experiences in the SE Asia tsunami I recently worked with fellow scientist Dwayne Meadows, (a tsunami survivor) to adapt these methods for environmental disaster response. Using these techniques we can minimize further damage to people and nature and allow both to recover. We have the ways; the question is whether government has the will!
Let us hope so. (For more information contact brosnan@deborahbrosnan.com)
IMAGES
The Mississippi Delta for comparison (landsat image)
Irrawaddy, Myanmar

Aquaculture

Fishing

Local Commerce on the Irrawaddy