- Lightning strikes continue to claim lives, mostly farmers’, in Bangladesh, especially across its northeastern region.
- Despite several measures by the Bangladeshi government, including palm tree plantation and installation of lightning arresters, all efforts so far have largely failed to protect lives.
- Experts suggest building public awareness about thunderstorms and thunder clouds to reduce deaths from lightning strikes.
The distance between farmer Sudhin Chandra Das’s home and his 150-decimal (0.6-hectare, or 1.5-acre) paddy field in Bangladesh’s northeastern region of Sylhet is more than half a kilometer (0.3 miles). During the boro rice harvesting season, usually mid-April, when thunderstorms are common, he cannot afford to stay at home, he said: He has to go to the vast open field to harvest the ripe crop, even though there is no shelter when lightnings strike.
“It’s scary. I don’t know how to protect myself, and I fear I could be killed by a strike at any moment,” Sudhin told Mongabay.
Sudhin lives in the Shalla subdistrict, Sunamganj district, in the Sylhet region, one of South Asia’s most lightning-prone zones. According to lightning data for the decade of 2016-25, Bangladesh’s northeastern zone witnesses 64 to 96 fatal lightning events per square kilometer (about 0.4 square miles) annually.
Sudhin said he considers himself fortunate to be alive. But he recalled news reports on people in Sunamganj being killed by lightning strikes this year and in previous years. On April 18 this year, at least 13 people, including five in Sunamganj, died by lightning strikes across Bangladesh.
An average of 300 people die from lightning strikes every year in the country, with the highest number of fatalities reported in the northeastern districts. According to Meherunnesa, a coordinator at the Disaster Forum, a Dhaka-based national disaster preparedness
network, Bangladesh witnessed the deaths of at least 218 people by lightning strikes between January and mid-June this year.
In an effort to minimize lightning strike fatalities, the preventive measures the Bangladeshi government has taken include installing lightning arresters, planting palm trees, and developing early weather forecasts. Still, these initiatives have largely failed to protect lives.
According to a recent news report, none of the lightning arresters installed in Sunamganj showed effectiveness in preventing deaths.
Experts Mongabay spoke to blamed the lack of preparedness, both by the disaster management authorities and the people living within the lightning-prone areas and beyond, in addressing the risks.
Earth and planetary sciences expert Ashraf Dewan, an associate professor at Curtin University, Australia, told Mongabay, “Institutional failures, knowledge gaps, and a general lack of awareness all contribute to lightning-related deaths in Bangladesh.”
A 2019 study co-authored by Dewan found that the peak in lightning-related deaths in Bangladesh happens between mid-April and early June. The study also found a link between lightning strike-related deaths and labor-intensive agricultural practices in specific regions in the country.
Dewan said, “Neither lightning frequency nor lightning-related deaths are consistently increasing [in Bangladesh]. The main reason for the high number of fatalities [in the country] is the significant increase in people’s exposure to lightning.”
According to Dewan, public awareness and education are essential to saving lives.
“If you look at cyclone-related deaths since [the country’s] independence in 1971, casualties have decreased dramatically in recent years due to effective preparedness programs. We need a similar approach for lightning hazards,” he suggested.
Failed protection?
State-owned news agency Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha, citing data from the Department of Disaster Management (DDM), reported that at least 3,485 people were killed by lightning strikes in the 2015-24 decade.
The Bangladeshi government declared lightning strikes a natural disaster in 2016.
Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) meteorologist Muhammad Abul Kalam Mallik, who has analyzed lightning-related death records based on the DDM statistics, said that 226 people died in 2015, 391 in 2016, 388 in 2017, 388 in 2018, 359 in 2019, 401 in 2020, 427 in 2021, 363 in 2022, 322 in 2023, 271 in 2024, and 243 in 2025 by lightning strikes. (The statistics of deaths are presented here to show how the Bangladeshi government’s initiatives to protect life failed.)
In 2021-22, the DDM installed some 300 lightning arresters in 15 vulnerable districts. Later, in February 2024, the then government planned to install 6,793 more lightning arresters in those districts. The plan has not been implemented yet.
DDM deputy director of mitigation Razaul Karim said, “Actually, the government did not find the project feasible.” According to him, Bangladesh now has only 336 lightning arresters across the vulnerable localities.
In 2017, the government launched a nationwide program to plant palm trees to reduce lightning-related deaths. After planting around 3.8 million palm trees, however, the program was scrapped as it seemed ineffective as a short-term solution.
Karim, however, told Mongabay that his department would prioritize plantation of palm trees as per the new government’s recently launched National Green Mission, a campaign to plant 250 million trees over the next five years.
In 2018, the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief supported the installation of eight sensors capable of early warning about lightning events in the country.
However, Mallik said that early warning alone cannot protect lives. According to him, BMD issues lightning warnings through social media two to four hours before an event.
“The deaths by lightning strikes prove that people do not listen to the early warnings,” Mallik said.
Given that the most affected people, especially the farmers who seldom use smartphones, are in lightning-prone zones, Mallik suggested that awareness building among the dwellers of lightning-prone zones about the meaning and identification of thunder clouds and the consequences of the appearance of thunder clouds is crucial.
Possible solutions
On June 8, disaster management and relief minister Asadul Habib Dulu informed the Bangladesh Parliament that the government is taking steps to plant palm trees, set up farmer shelters and install lightning arresters to reduce casualties from lightning strikes.
According to DDM officials, the farmer sheds would be installed initially in the northeastern areas, allowing farmers to take shelter whenever lightnings strike.
“The structures will include lightning arresting systems and can also be used for rice threshing, short-term [rice] storage and flood shelter purposes,” Karim said.
However, he could not provide information about the number of planned farmer shelters, as “the government has not yet decided on the number,” he said on June 15.
Mallik said that the northeastern region requires the construction of a series of such farmer shelters following international standards.
“Farmers do not get enough time to run to a safe shelter after they hear the sound of a thunderbolt. Hence, it is necessary to build a series of multipurpose shelters in close proximity,” Mallik recommended.
A study published in 2017 revealed that the victims of lightning strikes, mostly belonging to agrarian families, were travelling to or from homes and croplands, or moving around homesteads and courtyards at the time of the fatal strikes.
Co-author of the study, Md Faruk Hossain, an associate professor in Dhaka University’s department of geography and environment, said he supports the establishment of such farmer shelters.
“The target people need to be made aware so that they reach the nearest farmer shelter quickly during lightning. Otherwise, the entire campaign will fail,” Faruk said.
Mongabay asked Sunamganj-based farmer Sudhin about what he wants. “Build a shelter on a plinth near my paddy field so that I can take refuge there during lightning,” he said.
Banner image: Farmers of Bangladesh harvest ripe rice crop. Image by Zaheed Sarwer Khan via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
As lightning strike fatalities increase, Bangladesh still has no reliable preventive measures
Study links surge in lightning disasters in Bangladesh to transboundary air pollution
Citations:
Holle, R. L., Dewan, A., Said, R., Brooks, W. A., Hossain, M. F., & Rafiuddin, M. (2019). Fatalities related to lightning occurrence and agriculture in Bangladesh. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 41, Article 101264. doi:10.1016/j.ijdrr.2019.101264
Dewan, A., Hossain, M. F., Rahman, M. M., Yamane, Y., & Holle, R. L. (2017). Recent lightning-related fatalities and injuries in Bangladesh. Weather, Climate, and Society, 9(3), 575–589. doi:10.1175/WCAS-D-16-0128.1
Credits
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
