Rejuvenating Poldered Landscapes in a Tidally-Dominated, Sediment-Rich Delta: A Numerical Model and Analysis of the Effectiveness of Tidal River Management in Coastal Bangladesh

The low-lying, coastal region of Bangladesh has relied on poldering (the creation of embanked islands) since the 1960s to mitigate the effects of tidal inundation and storm surge from tropical cyclones. The result has been an increase in total arable land and the ability to sustain food production for one of the most densely populated countries in the world. However, poldering has had the unintended consequences of starving embanked landscapes of sediment and increasing high water levels through tidal amplification. Thus, polder elevations have been declining while tidal channels have been aggrading. Recent small-scale engineering projects, locally referred to as tidal river management (TRM), have attempted to combat these effects by allowing water and sediment exchange between the polders and the tidal network. Anecdotal reports claim great success for TRM in some locations, but not in others. However, to date there has been almost no quantitative analysis.

Here, we used measured sedimentation rates and water level data from Polder 32 (P32) and the adjacent pristine mangrove forest in southwest Bangladesh to parameterize a simple model of tidal inundation and resultant sediment accretion. P32 elevations are currently ~1 m lower than natural elevations resulting in ~105 cm of tidal inundation when embankments were breached versus only ~20 cm for the mangrove forest. We measured sedimentation rates of 20 cm/yr and 1 cm/yr, respectively. When normalized to the cumulative annual flooding depth, the resulting sediment extraction rates yield similar values of 300 mg/L and 230 mg/L. We employ these flooding depth and sediment extraction parameters in our model to quantify the amount of time and sediment needed to re-equilibrate the lowered polder elevation to that of the natural environment.

Although relatively simple, results from this preliminary model corroborate anecdotes of TRM’s effectiveness at restoring land-surface elevations in the polders of Bangladesh. Future work will add spatial variation and possibly integrate human actions with agent-based models.