Bangladesh’s poor suffer worst effects of climate change

Climate change means that people in Bangladesh have had to face several years of disruption in their lives due to heavier monsoons and rising tides.

Climatologists warn that the heating up of the earth’s atmosphere is making the country one of the most vulnerable to rising sea levels, coping with ever more devastating floods much more often.

This means that populations have to adapt to fast changing seasons and freak weather conditions. But most of those affected on the front line, live without electricity or televisions, so have never even heard of ‘climate change’.

Many of the villages affected in Hatibandha, a remote region in northern Bangladesh, are located on silt islands, known locally as chars, which are created in a vast delta by the swell of rivers, monsoon rains and sand carpeting.

The lives of the char people are bound up with the flow of rivers such as the Teesta, as the islands undergo constant erosion and reformation.

More than two million of some of Bangladesh’s poorest people are isolated in this ever changing terrain, living with the frequent risk of flooding.

Their livelihoods depend heavily on agriculture, with more than 50 per cent of the population consisting of landless poor villagers, possessing few assets and making them reliant on selling their own labour to land owners.

According to a World Bank report, 36 per cent of the population lives on less than $1 per day. The national literacy rate is only 41per cent, and levels of childhood malnourishment are very high with 48 per cent of children underweight. Such a dense population, highly vulnerable to natural disasters, severely negates any gains being made in development of the region.

Flooding disasters have persistently disrupted the everyday lives of char dwellers. In the immediate aftermath, families must survive in terrible conditions, as they find themselves trapped on whatever they can climb on, to avoid being submerged in foul-smelling dirty water.

Sometimes villages are cut off from the outside world for days as survivors wait for the waters to subside, with no access to food or fresh water. Whatever food they can find has to be rationed and they have no choice but to drink dirty river water.

During lean periods, particularly if flooding has played havoc with agricultural livelihoods, male family members are forced to migrate to cities in search of income. Law and order often breaks down, making children vulnerable to sexual and physical abuse. They are prevented from going to school in order to help out at home and have nowhere safe to play. Schools are often shut as they become crucial flood shelters for villagers.

Flooding increases malnutrition and the spread of diseases, such as dysentery and diarrhoea, with the combined lack of food, water, sanitation and shelter affecting children the most. Homes along with crops, livestock and commodities are lost and people cannot even travel to other districts to look for work in order to provide for their families.

Girls’ lives in particular are adversely affected by such disasters, says Mahfuzar Rahman, programme coordinator for Plan Bangladesh, which is working to increase children’s participation in reducing disaster risk.

If children are expected to stay at home to help support their family through work, it is often the girls who are first to be removed from school.

And while boys often go outside the home to higher ground with their fathers to rescue livestock and tools, girls are made to stay at home with their mothers. “There, she is at risk from the house suddenly collapsing, further flood, snake bites and not being able to escape the dirty water,” Rahman says.

It is clear that poverty limits people’s capacity to cope with disaster. More than 80 per cent of char dwellers live in extreme poverty and 95 per cent suffer at least one month of flood insecurity every year, according to last year’s UN Human Development Report.

Therefore reducing the risk associated with flooding is critical for Bangladesh’s char inhabitants, most of whom are landless and compelled to stay where they are. Flood-prone and remote, the chars are undesirable to anyone with other options, but for those with none, they provide land to cultivate and rear cattle.

One of the greatest problems facing Bangladesh is the creation of climate change refugees: people who can no longer farm on drowning coastal and river areas are forced inland to the country’s already crammed cities.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the Nobel-prize winning chair of the UN’s Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, has warned that Bangladesh is likely to generate such refugees on a scale never seen before.

In Hatibandha, perched on a raised dirt road skirting the jagged banks of the Teesta river, lies mounting evidence of the area’s rapidly disappearing banks: a continuous row of hundreds of bamboo and corrugated iron shacks. Among 2000 families have been displaced by the river erosion and are now crammed on to just two kilometres of road. Most have been forced into menial work, says Rafiqul Islam Faruki, the Plan Bangladesh project’s area coordinator. “They’ve lost everything. They are displaced people.”