One Delta, Six Fevers

A good doctor never judges a patient by a single reading. She checks the pulse, the temperature and the breath before naming the illness. When the government adopted the Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100 (BDP 2100) in 2018, its planners did something quietly radical. Instead of treating the country as one uniform floodplain, they divided it into six hotspots: the Coastal Zone (27,738 sq km), the Barind and Drought-Prone Areas (22,848 sq km), the Haor and Flash Flood Areas (16,574 sq km), the Chattogram Hill Tracts (13,295 sq km), the River Systems and Estuaries (35,204 sq km) and the Urban Areas (19,823 sq km). Each is a separate patient with a separate fever: too much water, too little, water turned salty, or water arriving in precisely the wrong week.
This piece is meant as a policy brief in plain language. On behalf of the people who feed this nation, it asks two questions of every hotspot: what does its chart say today, and what must policymakers do about it? The readings come from government agencies, research institutes and independent think tanks. Together, they tell a story more urgent than any disaster headline and, I will argue, more hopeful than our habitual fatalism allows, provided policy follows the evidence.
Salt in the bloodstream: The coast’s illness is slow, silent and measurable. According to the Soil Resource Development Institute (SRDI), salt-affected land in the coastal districts stood at about 833,000 hectares in 1973. By the 2010 survey it had reached roughly 1.056 million hectares, more than 62 per cent of the coast’s cultivated land. SRDI data reported in 2026 show nearly another 100,000 hectares turned saline since 2009, so about two-thirds of the region’s cultivable land is now affected. Worryingly, salinity has appeared for the first time in Jashore Sadar and in Kashiani and Muksudpur upazilas of Gopalganj, well beyond the traditional coastal belt.
Science has fought back with salt-tolerant rice, but the soil is outrunning the seed. Our best released varieties tolerate about 8 deciSiemens per metre (dS/m), yet across large parts of Khulna, Satkhira, Bagerhat, Patuakhali and Barguna, soil salinity now ranges between 8 and 16 dS/m. Reduced upstream freshwater flow, brackish-water shrimp enclosures, poorly operated sluice gates and ageing polders also push salt deeper inland.
Acute shocks come on top. Cyclone Remal in May 2024 affected 48 districts, damaging summer vegetables on more than 52,000 hectares, jute on nearly 30,000 and transplanted Aus on over 21,000, while roughly 74,500 shrimp and fish enclosures were inundated. A coastal farmer is caught between two clocks: the slow clock of salt and the fast clock of storms.

A rice bowl running dry: If the coast suffers from too much salt, the north-west suffers from dehydration. The Barind Tract receives roughly half the rainfall of the country’s east and south, yet for four decades it has been turned into a Boro powerhouse by pumping groundwater. Rajshahi, Chapainawabganj and Naogaon together produce about 1.4 million tonnes of Boro. The bill is now due. Bangladesh Water Development Board data show groundwater in parts of Nachole upazila falling from 29.09 to 31.04 metres below the surface between January 2023 and January 2025, with little recovery since.
The state has reached for strong medicine. In December 2025, 25 upazilas were declared water-crisis areas, and a January 2026 gazette imposed ten years of groundwater restrictions, banning new non-drinking tube wells and calling for groundwater irrigation to be phased out within two years. But a prescription is only as good as the patient’s ability to follow it. Barind Multipurpose Development Authority officials estimate that private pumps account for nearly 73 per cent of extraction, and farmers admit pumping illegally to survive.
Heat compounds the thirst. The region grows mango on more than 93,000 hectares, and repeated heatwaves now cause premature fruit drop. A 2025 study in Global Food Security warns that if climate pressures rise and water management falters, food security here could fall by more than half. Barind farmers are being asked to abandon the crop that made their region famous without yet being offered a livelihood that pays as well.
A twenty-day gamble: No hotspot lives on a knife-edge like the haor basin of Sunamganj, Kishoreganj, Netrokona, Habiganj, Sylhet, Moulvibazar and Brahmanbaria. For most of the year, land is water. Farmers get one serious chance, the Boro crop, which must be harvested before pre-monsoon flash floods pour down from the Meghalaya hills. A 2024 hydrological study estimates the region produces over three million tonnes of boro a year, around 17 per cent of national output. The World Bank notes the safe cultivation window has shrunk to 15 to 20 days, from roughly 30 a decade earlier.
This year the gamble was lost again. In 2026, Boro was planted on about 455,000 hectares across seven haor districts. Untimely heavy rain and upstream inflows struck at peak harvest. The Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) put the damaged area at 49,073 hectares, about 11 per cent of haor cropland, while the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) estimated 122,016 hectares, more than double. Preliminary DAE figures counted around 213,000 tonnes of rice lost and over 236,000 farmers affected. In the lowest basins, losses reached about 85 per cent.
That gap between two respected estimates is itself a diagnosis: we cannot treat what we cannot measure. In 2017, early flash floods destroyed rice, fish and fodder worth Tk 5,081 crore by official estimates. In a one-crop economy, losing the Boro means losing the year.
The hills are losing their springs: The Chattogram Hill Tracts were long not even considered a climate hotspot. That changed in 2017, when extreme monsoon rainfall triggered devastating landslides, especially in Rangamati. Traditional jhum cultivation, in which a plot is cropped for one to three years and then left fallow for five to twenty, is rapidly giving way to commercial cash crops and plantations. Incomes have risen for some, but soil erosion, landslides and dried-up streams have followed, and springs that supplied drinking water are disappearing.
A 2025 study in the journal Earth, combining thirty years of satellite rainfall data with a survey of 400 households, offers a caution: the hills’ vulnerability cannot be blamed on climate change alone; it is entangled with deforestation, insecure land governance and the long marginalisation of Indigenous communities. In the hills, watershed protection and secure land rights are as much climate adaptation as any embankment.
Land that walks away: Along the Jamuna, Ganges and Padma, the land itself is mobile. Over roughly five decades, according to the Center for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS), the Jamuna alone has eroded about 94,220 hectares while giving back only 14,955. The Ganges and Padma have taken a further 30,290 and 33,843 hectares. For a char farmer, a land deed can describe a field now in the middle of a river. Government reports cited by the World Bank suggest around 50,000 households become homeless through river erosion in an average year.
Yet this hotspot carries the most encouraging reading on the chart. Annual erosion along these rivers has fallen from roughly 9,500 hectares in 1995 to about 1,034 hectares in 2025, helped by bank protection and by CEGIS’s satellite-based forecasts, issued every year since 2004. For 2026, CEGIS predicts around 915 hectares at risk across eleven reaches in Gaibandha, Jamalpur, Kurigram, Pabna, Kushtia and Faridpur. Prediction works. The challenge now is turning every forecast into timely relocation support, so families move homes and seed stocks before the river arrives.
When the hotspot map itself moves: The most important finding of recent years is that the fever is spreading beyond the boxes drawn in 2018. In August 2024, flash floods submerged districts few had considered high-risk. Crops on 208,573 hectares across 23 districts were damaged, an estimated 714,514 tonnes worth about Tk 3,346 crore. In Feni, some 80 per cent of cropland was affected. The CPD estimated total eastern damage at Tk 14,421 crore, with agriculture and forestry taking the largest share. Feni flooded again in 2025.
Heat, too, ignores boundaries. In April 2024, much of Bangladesh endured thirty consecutive days of heatwave, the longest since 1948, scorching chillies, pulses and paddy. Add salinity reaching Jashore and Gopalganj, and the message is unmistakable: an adaptive plan must keep redrawing its own map.
Where rural losses go to live: Cities are where the farm crisis ultimately settles. A family that loses its land to the Jamuna, its paddy to salt or its harvest to a flash flood moves to Dhaka, Chattogram or Khulna. Every hectare saved in Satkhira or Sunamganj is therefore also an investment in urban stability. Cities, in turn, are the markets that can pay farmers fairly for climate-resilient produce, if supply chains, cold storage and fair pricing are in place.
The prescription-five policy doses
First, measure honestly and quickly. When official and independent estimates of the same harm loss differ by more than double, compensation and planning go astray. The CPD’s call for a hybrid loss-assessment system combining DAE surveys, satellite verification, Water Development Board data and community reporting deserves immediate adoption in every hotspot.
Second, stop asking rice to do everything. Where salinity exceeds what any rice can bear, integrated crop-fish systems, saline-tolerant non-rice crops, floating and sorjan beds and homestead gardening offer better odds. In Barind, curbs on groundwater must travel with a viable alternative: less thirsty crops, fruit, livestock and guaranteed markets.
Third, treat water as a shared bank account: re-excavate canals and ponds for surface irrigation and rainwater harvesting in the northwest, expand tidal river management on the coast, and examine designating a few haors as temporary storage to absorb early flash floods and protect the rest.
Fourth, finance risk before disaster, not only relief after it. Index-based crop insurance, pre-arranged disaster risk finance and directly accessible local adaptation funds can turn a lost season into a setback rather than a slide into debt.
Fifth, put the most exposed farmers at the centre. Women, who manage much of the homestead, livestock and post-harvest work; Indigenous households in the hills and the Barind; and landless char dwellers face these hotspots with the fewest buffers. Adaptation designed without them will fail them.
A plan too valuable to discard
Let me be plain. BDP 2100 is not a political manifesto. It is a scientific document that belongs to the nation. Bangladeshi experts spent three and a half years and produced 26 baseline studies to prepare it, with technical support from the Netherlands and the World Bank, before the National Economic Council approved it in September 2018. It set out 80 projects worth about US$37 billion for its first phase to 2030 and asked that delta investment rise from roughly 0.8 to 2.5 per cent of GDP. The Netherlands still finances its institutional backbone: in December 2025 the support project under the General Economics Division was extended to December 2026, bringing the Dutch grant to about Tk 16.5 crore.
The plan has had fair critics. Experts have pointed to thin hydro-morphological studies, inadequate public consultation, an infrastructure-heavy project list and weak community engagement. These are arguments for revising the plan, not discarding it, and its own principle of adaptive delta management demands exactly such revision. To shelve a national asset of this scale because of the government that adopted it would be costly self-harm: it would throw years of public money and expert labour into the dustbin and abandon the very farmers whose fields these hotspots describe. No responsible government should commit that error. Governments change; deltas do not. Salt will keep advancing, aquifers will fall and flash floods will arrive at harvest, whichever party sits in office. The wiser course is to own the plan, update its hotspot map with this evidence, open it to genuine public scrutiny, and fund it. The six fevers are already telling us what to treat. The only question is whether we treat the patient in time.
______________________________________________________________
The writer is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Development Studies and Sustainability (IDSS), United International University (UIU) and Adjunct Faculty member in the Department of Agriculture at Daffodil International University