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PATUAKHALI: After cyclone gales tore down his home in 2007, Bangladeshi fisherman Abdul Aziz packed up what was left of his belongings and moved about half a kilometer inland, further away from storm surge waves.
A year later, the sea swallowed the area where his old home had been.
Now, 75-year-old Aziz fishes above his submerged former home and lives on the other side of a low earth and concrete embankment, against which roaring waves crash.
“The fish are swimming there in the water on my land,” he told AFP, pointing toward his vanished village. “It is part of the advancing ocean.”
Government scientists say rising seas driven by climate change are drowning Bangladesh’s densely populated coast at one of the fastest global rates, and at least a million people on the coast will be forced to relocate within a generation.
“Few countries experience the far-reaching and diverse effects of climate change as intensely as Bangladesh,” Abdul Hamid, director general of the environment department, wrote in a report last month.
The three-part study calculated the low-lying South Asian nation was experiencing a sea level rise in places more than 60 percent higher than the global average.
By 2050, at present rates of local sea level rise, “more than one million people may have to be displaced,” it read, based on a quarter of a century of satellite data from the US space agency NASA and its Chinese counterpart CNSA.
Sea levels are not rising at the same rate around the world, due chiefly to Earth’s uneven gravity field and variations in ocean dynamics.
Study lead A.K.M Saiful Islam said Bangladesh’s above-average increases were driven by melting ice caps, water volumes increasing as oceans warm, and the vast amounts of river water that flow into the Bay of Bengal every monsoon.
The study provides “a clear message” that policymakers should be prepared for “mitigation and adaptation,” he said.
Islam, a member of the UN’s IPCC climate change assessment body, examined the vast deltas where the mighty Himalayan rivers of the Ganges and Brahmaputra reach the sea.
“In recent decades, the sea level rose 3.7 millimeters (0.14 inches) each year globally,” Islam added.
“In our study, we saw that the sea level rise is higher along our coast... 4.2 millimeters to 5.8 millimeters annually.”
That incremental rise might sound tiny. But those among the estimated 20 million people living along Bangladesh’s coast say the destruction comes in terrifying waves.
“It is closing in,” said fisherman Aziz about the approaching sea. “Where else can we escape?“
The threat is increasing.
Most of the country’s coastal areas are a meter or two above sea level, and storms bring seawater further inland, turning wells and lakes salty and killing crops on once fertile land.
“When the surge is higher, the seawater intrudes into our houses and land,” said Ismail Howladar, a 65-year-old farmer growing chilli peppers, sweet potatoes, sunflowers and rice.
“It brings only loss for us.”
Cyclones — which have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Bangladesh in recent decades — are becoming more frequent as well as growing in intensity and duration due to the impact of climate change, scientists say.
Shahjalal Mia, a 63-year-old restaurant owner, said he watches the sea “grasp more land” each year.
“Many people have lost their homes to the sea already,” he said. “If there is no beach, there won’t be any tourists.”
He said he had experienced cyclones and searing heatwaves grow worse, with temperatures soaring above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).
“We are facing two, three, even four cyclones every year now,” he said.
“And I can’t measure temperatures in degrees but, simply put, our bodies can’t endure this.”
Bangladesh is among the countries ranked most vulnerable to disasters and climate change, according to the Global Climate Risk Index.
In April, the nation of around 170 million people experienced the hottest month, and the most sustained heatwave temperatures, in its history.
Last month, a cyclone that killed at least 17 people and destroyed 35,000 homes, was one of the quickest-forming and longest-lasting seen, the government’s meteorological department said.
Both events were pinned on rising global temperatures.
Ainun Nishat, from Brac University in the capital Dhaka, said that the poorest were paying the price for carbon emissions from wealthier nations.
“We cannot do anything for Bangladesh if other nations, notably rich countries, do not do anything to fight emissions,” he said.
Bangladesh is running out of time, Nishat added.
“It is becoming too late to prevent disasters,” he said. “We are unequipped to bring change.”

WASHINGTON: Members of US Congress on Thursday pressed Microsoft to explain a “cascade of avoidable errors” that allowed a Chinese hacking group to breach emails of senior US officials.
Microsoft President Brad Smith spent more than three hours answering questions from members of the House Committee on Homeland Security in Washington, assuring them cybersecurity is being woven more deeply into the technology company’s culture.
“Microsoft accepts responsibility for each and every one of the issues cited” in a scathing US government report about the breach “without equivocation or hesitation,” Smith told the committee.
The Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), led by the US Department of Homeland Security, conducted a seven-month investigation into the incident last year that involved the China-affiliated cyberespionage actor Storm-0558.
“Microsoft has an enormous footprint in both government and critical infrastructure networks,” US congressman and committee member Bennie Thompson said to Smith as the hearing opened.
“It is our shared interest that the security issues raised by the (report) be addressed quickly.”
The operation, which was first discovered by the US State Department in June 2023, included hacks on the official and personal mailboxes of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns.
Microsoft’s core business is to provide cloud computing services, such as Azure or Office360, that host sensitive data and power business and government operations across major sectors of the economy.
The report criticized a Microsoft corporate culture that was “at odds with... the level of trust customers place in the company.”
The review identified a series of operational and strategic decisions by Microsoft that opened the door to the breach, including the failure to identify a new employee’s compromised laptop following a corporate acquisition in 2021.
It also found that Microsoft fell short of safety standards seen at competing cloud companies, including Google, Amazon and Oracle.
“The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable and should never have occurred,” the review said, pinpointing “the cascade of Microsoft’s avoidable errors that allowed this intrusion to succeed.”
The report also recommended that Microsoft develop and publicly release a plan with timelines to enact wide-ranging security reforms across its products and practices.
“The real challenge is how you achieve effective lasting cultural change,” Smith said, noting Microsoft has nearly 226,000 employees.
Smith said Microsoft has the equivalent of 34,000 engineers working full time on answering the security shortcomings in “the largest engineering project focused on cybersecurity in the history of digital technology.”
Microsoft’s board on Wednesday approved a change that will tie cybersecurity accomplishments with annual bonuses for senior executives and make it part of every employee’s annual review, according to Smith.
Microsoft detects some 300 million cyberattacks on its customers daily, with most of those coming from China, Iran, Korea, Russia, or ransomware operations, Smith told the committee.
“We’re dealing with four formidable foes in China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, and they are getting better,” Smith said.
“We should expect them to work together; they’re waging attacks at an extraordinary rate.”
While it is inevitable that adversaries will use artificial intelligence for increasingly sophisticated attacks, the technology is already being used to strengthen cyber defenses, Smith added.