The Economist and Nature have recently referred two research findings of CEGIS. The first, referred in The Economist and titled “Taming the Brahmaputra: The hungry river”, is mainly based on a research by Dr. Maminul Haque Sarker, DED of CEGiS, on the Jamuna River and its ongoing bank protection works. The second, also based on a research by Dr. Sarker, is on delta subsidence, published in Nature in the article titled “Holding back the tide”. This year, the Jamuna is likely to “eat” another 1,300 hectare of land, predicts Maminul Haque Sarker of the Centre for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) in Dhaka. The outfit produces a forecast of how much land, how many kilometres of road, hospitals, mosques and government offices will be swallowed up by Bangladesh’s big rivers every year. It has done so, and with surprising accuracy, for a decade. The model’s predictions are used to warn people along the river—a red flag placed in the ground by local authorities means “high risk” of erosion, a yellow flag means there may still be time.
