Significant changes for the better in the management of the environment are rarely noted today in Bangladesh despite the formation of policies, laws and regulatory apparatuses to protect the environment. The environment of Bangladesh has only gone on declining during the last two decades. 

Dhaka city was rated as the world's most air polluted city in the nineties. It has improved its status since that time by pushing the worst air polluting auto rickshaw away from the metropolitan areas of Dhaka. But the air in the city still remains that of one of the most polluted ones in the world in the absence of other follow up measures.

Sections  of rivers flowing around the big concentrations of urban population of Bangladesh  have turned so polluted from unregulated discharge of effluents that these are like dark liquids devoid of oxygen and aquatic life.

Biodiversity of large parts of Bangladesh have been threatened by a number of man-made factors. One of them is the country's  overpopulation and  its consequent impact on the environment. But compared to the devastating population bomb that is building up for this small country, the response to it  appears to be  hardly a proportionate one against the threat.

Widespread presence of arsenic in underground water, the loss of soil fertility from mono-cropping without crop rotation, toxicity of the soil and the consequent threatened  food chain from indiscriminate use of chemical fertlisers and pesticides, etc., are the other growingly formidable environmental problems.

Deforestation has whittled down  to below ten per cent the country's forests and vegetation cover ; the  country's  basic environmental  balance has been threatened as a result. Afforestation programmes may have had only a marginal impact  on these conditions.   This is because deforestation activities are considered to be greater than afforestation ones. The coastal areas of the country are poorly supervised. Foreign vessels dump their waste matters too freely in the coastal areas and perhaps such vessels had dumped on occasions  cargoes of  very hazardous wastes in Bangladesh's territorial waters finding the same an unchallenged zone  while indulging in such activities. There are many sides to the environmental crisis that is gradually showing up in Bangladesh.

The environmental policy should lead to environmental laws to protect and expand the country's forests and vegetation, to protect and increase the number of its reserved forests, to protect its bio-diversity, to promote environment friendly urban areas, etc. Externally, under the environment policy, Bangladesh must pursue a more strident and vocal role internationally to draw attention to the plight of Bangladesh from the earth warming. But the policy will remain ineffectual as long as it remains on paper and is not enforced. For the environmental policy to bear fruit, it must go the whole hog with the creation of apparatuses in its support such as the environmental courts,  the environmental police, etc., as well as  their efficient and scrupulous  functioning.

Source: Ineependentbd

image: Dhakatribune