Although the fisherman depends on the ocean for his livelihood, he has mixed feelings about the water after rising sea levels drowned his plot of land on Kutubdia Island on Bangladesh's southern coast 22 years ago.

"Back then this area was barren and we were among the first to find this land," says 50-year-old Alam, one of around 150 people who left the island in the 1980s.

Now his bamboo shack at Kutubdiapara -- named after the island they left -- is just one of thousands in the settlement located next to the beach resort of Cox's Bazar.

Rough tides linked to rising sea levels have drowned 40 percent of the land on Kutubdia Island over the past half century, according to non-government organisation Coast Trust, which says the situation is getting worse each year.

The villagers who have fled the island are what scientists -- including those from the United Nations Inter-government Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- are calling Bangladesh's first climate refugees.

They say the situation will become much worse as rising sea levels devour low-lying coastal areas of the delta country.

The Nobel prize-winning IPCC says there will be 20 million people like Jafar Alam by 2050 because of an increase of extreme weather conditions caused by climate change.

James Hansen, director of the US-based NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says Bangladesh's entire 144 million population will become environmental refugees by the end of the century.

Leaders of the impoverished South Asian nation will appeal in London on September 10 to the British government and other international donors for financial and technical support to fight the consequences of climate change.

But not everyone agrees with the dire predictions for Bangladesh.

At Boyer Char village, 200 kilometres (125 miles) north of the Kutubdiapara settlement, 55-year-old Nasir Sareng enjoys living conditions his southern neighbours can only dream about.

The newly formed land he lives on was created when sediment from the big Himalayan rivers -- the Ganges and the Brahmaputra -- began settling on the coast's edge in the 1980s.

"New land is rising everywhere in this estuary," said Sareng, a fisherman. "I hear Bangladesh will sink under the sea but I keep seeing new land rising."

The Dhaka-based Centre for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) has studied 32 years of satellite images and says the country's landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually.

It says 1,000 square kilometres of land has risen from the sea in the past three decades.

The rivers, which meet in the centre of Bangladesh, carry more than a billion tonnes of sediment every year and a third of it rests on the southern coastline where the new territory is forming.

Still, one of Bangladesh's leading environmental experts, Atiq Rahman, says the number of climate refugees is growing despite the new land.

"Yes, the new land is forming, but because sea levels are rising so fast that millions of people will still be climate refugees," he says.

For the inhabitants of the Kutubdiapara settlement, help from abroad cannot come soon enough.

"I left the island 17 years ago when my land was swamped by the sea," says tea seller Didarul Islam, 50.

"I took shelter on a dyke for years, but last year the sea also devoured the dyke, forcing me to leave my beloved home forever."

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