Climate fears for Bangladesh's future
Climate fears for Bangladesh's future
part: 1Masuma's home is a bamboo and polythene shack in one of the hundreds of slums colonising every square metre of unbuilt land in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.
Masuma is an environmental refugee, fleeing from the floods which have always beset her homeland but which are predicted to strike more severely with climate change.
She has found her way to the city from the rural district of Bogra - a low-lying area originally formed from Himalayan silt where the landscape is still being shaped by the mighty Brahmaputra river as it snakes and carves through the soft sandy soil.
"In Bogra we had a straw-made house that was nice. When the flood came there was a big sucking of water and everything went down," Masuma says.
"Water was rising in the house and my sister left her baby upon the bed. When she came back in, the baby was gone. The baby had been washed away and later on we found the body," she recalls.
'Climate refugees'
Masuma's story is already commonplace in Dhaka, the fastest-growing city in the world. Its infrastructure is creaking under the weight of the new arrivals. Climate change is likely to increase the risks to people like her.
Climate modellers forecast that as the world warms, the monsoon rains in the region will concentrate into a shorter period, causing a cruel combination of more extreme floods and longer periods of drought.
They also forecast that as sea level rises by up to a metre this century (the very top of the forecast range), as many as 30 million Bangladeshis could become climate refugees.
"Climate refugees is a term we are going to hear much more of in the future," observes Saleem-ul Huq, a fellow at the London-based International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED).
He says many Bangladeshi families escaping floods and droughts have already slipped over the Indian border to swell the shanty towns of Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta.
"The problem is hidden at the moment but it will inevitably come to the fore as climate change forces more and more people out of their homes.
"There will be a high economic cost - and countries that have to bear that cost are likely to be demanding compensation from rich nations for a problem they have not themselves caused," Mr Huq predicts.
It is a problem that incenses informed politicians in countries like Bangladesh, which are at the sharp end of climate change.
Environment Minister Jafrul Islam Chowdhury demands that rich nations should take responsibility for a problem they have caused.
"I feel angry, because we are suffering for their activities. They are responsible for our losses, for the damage to our economy, the displacement of our people."
The UK government is taking something of a lead in helping Bangladesh try to cope, by conducting a review aimed at ensuring that its international aid programme takes account of a changing climate.
The Department for International Development (DfID) believes that up to half its aid projects in the country could be compromised by climate change.
Tom Tanner, climate and development fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, UK, is in Dhaka reviewing UK aid.
"We estimate that up to 50% of the (British) donor investment in a country like Bangladesh is at risk from the impacts of climate change," he says.
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