Expanding salinity threatens
Sundarban.
Decreasing flow
of water through
the rivers from upstream
is destroying the
ecosystem of Sundarban. Experts from
home and abroad
observed that alarming decrease in
water flow down
the rivers caused
high salinity in both
water and soil
of Sundarban, causing
a massive change in
fauna composition of
the forest. Sundarban, which
lies across the
outer deltas of the
Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers, is the largest mangrove forest
in the world.
The number of
timber producing big trees such as Sundari is decreasing at the
proportionate rate at
the increase of
salinity, Abstract from a
paper on Biodiversity
and its Conservation
in Sundarban Mangrove Ecosystem by Indian scholars Brij Science journal
also revealed the same result (New Age ,
2011). The latest report
of World Conservation Monitoring warned that a
long-term ecological change is taking place in Sundarban due to the eastward
migration of the Ganges, abandonment of some distributaries and past diversion
of water and
withdrawals for irrigation (New Age, 2011).
