What’s particularly notable and disturbing about the situation in crowded delta regions like Bangladesh is that the rise in sea levels is, for the moment at least, not even close to the main driver of inundation risk.
The damming of Asia’s great rivers has greatly reduced the sediment flows that created the deltas in the first place and maintain them now. James Syvitski and co-authors provided a valuable overview of this problem in “Sinking deltas due to human activities,” an important Nature Geoscience paper in 2010.
That paper and other studies also point to the importance of groundwater pumping (and in some places gas drilling and extraction) in driving alarmingly fast subsidence of urban areas, including in Dhaka, where, as Harris reports in The Times, many of those leaving coastal areas are bound.
A recent study cited in the Bangladesh newspaper the Daily Star concluded that Dhaka is sinking 13.91 millimeters a year. That is 10 times the rate at which sea level in that part of the Bay of Bengal is rising.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/rising-seas-dams-aquifer-pumping-delta-blues/
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