New Study: Bangladesh’s Coast Has Expanded Seaward By 2677 Square Kilometers Since 1990

Another alarmist sea level rise/coastal flooding narrative collapses under the weight of observational evidence.

In 1989, the year the U.N. assembled what was to become the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a “senior U.N. environmental official” warned that world leaders, or politicians, needed to enact policies to “solve the greenhouse effect” by the year 2000. If governmental policies were not implemented to reverse the global warming trend within ten years, “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels.”

Image Source: AP News

A concerning regional setting at the time was Bangladesh, a country with 90 million people residing near coastal areas. The warning specified that “one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth” of its coastal population (20-25 million people).

But the alarmist warnings were, of course, wildly wrong. The opposite has happened.

A new study, utilizing remote sensing and geographic information system data, finds the total land surface of Bangladesh has expanded from 134,382 km² in 1990 to 137,656 km² by 2022, a 3,274 km² net increase in land area.

The vast majority of this land area expansion has been the consequence of receding relative sea levels along the coasts and synchronous seaward coastal land growth.

In 1990, the Bangladesh coasts measured 17,653 km² along the Bay of Bengal. By 2022, the Bangladesh coasts had expanded to 20,330 km², a 2,677 km² (13.2%) seaward coastal expansion.

Not only have coastal populations not been displaced by rising sea levels, now thousands of more square kilometers of land is above sea level. Bangladesh’s population has swelled to 173 million (2023).

Image Source: Shahid et al., 2024

Coastal land area growth has been occurring not just in Bangladesh, but satellite data reveal that since the 1980s “the coasts are growing all over the world“.

A sample reef island in the Coral Triangle (between SW Sulawesi and the Strait of Makassar) shows “overall shoreline advance has led to a total island area of nearly 23 ha, indicating an increase of ~13% over the last 24 years” (Kappelmann et al., 2024).

A comparison of how relatively smaller the island was in 1897 vs. 2023 (lower right image) demonstrates how much more land area is above sea level today than 125 years ago in this region.

Image Source: Kappelmann et al., 2024

Deltaic regions are home to over 40% of the world’s mangroves. And now another new study indicates “80% of the mangroves’ shorelines are expanding seaward” from 1986 to 2020.

“We found that the total area of mangrove forests display a significant gain with average change rate of 80.8 ha/yr during 1986-2020.”

“Further, the mangrove forest shorelines present an expansion rate of 18.9 m/yr over the past 35 years.”

Image Source: Dai et al., 2024

The alarmist narrative claims global warming means “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels” in the 21st century. Observations do not support this alarmist narrative.