Tag

Encroaching Seas

  • Drinking water salinity impacting maternal health in Bangladesh

    December 9, 2015

    Drinking wells in the villages of southwest Bangladesh have been contaminated with salty ocean water for so long, people have gotten used to the taste. Now, scientists think that worsening salinity could be having dire, long-lasting health effects on the people living in the region — and climate change is likely to blame. The world’s […]

  • Summer: A season of suffering in Mozambique’s Beira

    December 9, 2015

    Sixty two-year-old Luciano Mangaeao of Paranora in Beira, Mozambique could not hide his fear. He wiped his sweaty brow with the back of his hand on a sweltering afternoon and remarked dejectedly: “It’s almost rain season and I know what it means for us. It means a season of suffering; floods and storms are coming […]

  • Climate change laps at front door of the Torres Strait Islands

    December 8, 2015

    Mebai Warusam sits under his stilt-supported house, facing the Pacific Ocean’s turquoise waters lapping 50 metres from his front gate. At 91, born and raised on the island of Saibai in the Torres Strait, he is an elder visitors and locals turn to for knowledge. A few years ago, he says, researchers from down south […]

  • Troubled waters ahead for Solomon Islands residents

    December 8, 2015

    There are troubled waters ahead for a Polynesia group of people within the Melanesian country of Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. With more than half a million residents, the Solomon Islands is comprised of mostly dark-skinned Melanesian people with a smaller population of fairer skinned Micronesian and Polynesians. As many of these minority populations […]

  • Landlocked Islanders

    December 8, 2015

    The amount of water is incomprehensible. We’ve been flying for hours, and just when we’re about as far from a landmass as you can possibly get—a spot where the curving, wave-flecked Pacific Ocean stretches thousands of kilometers in every direction—an island slides into view. It’s no more than a snippet of sand and palm trees, […]

  • Egypt’s Nile River Delta is sinking into the sea

    December 8, 2015

    It’s not bad luck hurting Egypt’s farmers—it’s the sea. It’s warming, rising and expanding onto the low-lying, delta lands and seeping into the water that feeds them. By the end of the century, 60 percent of the delta region will be so saturated with salt as to be barely farmable.

  • Vietnam’s ‘rice bowl’ is sinking

    November 25, 2015

    Part of the Mekong Delta – home to 20% of Vietnam’s population and 50% of its rice production – is at risk of disappearing as sea levels rise. In fields across Vietnam’s Ca Mau Province, one of the country’s most important agricultural regions, wispy rows of rice struggle to grow in dingy yellow water. “This […]