This article about land loss in South East England doesn’t do a very good job explaining exactly how climate change is speeding up the loss of land around Beccles, but that land is returning to the sea is certain.
This winter a 50-foot-wide strip of Roger Middleditch’s sugar-beet field fell into the North Sea, his rich East Anglian lands reduced by a large fraction of their acreage. The adjacent potato field, once 23 acres, is now less than 3 — too small to plant at all, he said.
Coastal erosion has been a fact of life here for a century, because the land under East Anglia is slowly sinking. But the erosion has never been as quick and cataclysmic as it has been in recent years, an effect of climate change and global warming, many scientists say.
In Bangladesh, however, the connection between climate change and land loss is crystal clear.
Either the water is rising and covering crop lands,
Even without television and newspapers, Shahidul can sense that something just isn’t right about the weather. “It gets warmer every year, there are more storms and the monsoon doesn’t come on time,” he says. The water level in front of his house also rises a little every year. “When I moved here, we still had three fields in front of the house. Now there are only two,” Shahidul goes on. “I’m afraid the water will take another piece away from me this year.” As a precautionary measure, he had the platform for his little barn built half a meter higher. “You never know what will happen.”
or the ground water is becoming more saline:
Salt in the groundwater has fundamentally changed Mondal’s life. The 28-year-old farmer once grew rice and vegetables, just as his father did before him, roughly 90 kilometers from the coast, in small village of Munshiganj in south-western Bangladesh. Mondal used to harvest a number of times each year. It was a life of hard labor, but they had enough to eat. Then rice production started to decline, and eventually the vegetable crops failed entirely. Another farmer told him that the salt in the water was to blame for the poor harvests.