HOW CLIMATE CHANGE IS IMPACTING BANGLADESH
Millions of Bangladeshi’s living along the coast are at risk of being displaced due to climate change - this article shares how they are adapting.
Mongla is a coastal town about 30 miles inland from the Bay of Bengal in the southern most part of Bangladesh. Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, is branding Mongla as a climate-resilient town for those displaced by climate change.
“When it comes to adaptation Mongla is a success story. Changes are coming there as an example of how climate refugees could transform their life through new opportunities, through a new approach of adaptation,” Haq said.
The vision of transformative adaptation is to create opportunities for climate migrants to live and work in an environment where the host population accepts them. Incremental adjustments, such as introducing salinity-tolerant rice varieties, have been taking place in Bangladesh for years, helping climate refugees cope with the impacts of climate change where they are living today.
“But we will not be able to do it forever,” said Haq. “So we need to go for transformative adaptation, which is to enable people to move somewhere else and be better off.”
In recent years, the Bangladesh government has spent millions of taka (tens of thousands of dollars) to protect the Mongla town with climate-resilient infrastructure, drawing at-risk people from remote villages. Investments, mostly foreign, have doubled at the Mongla Export Processing Zone (EPZ) over the last four years, creating new jobs in its factories for the climate refugees from the region. The funds – which come from the United States, Japan, South Korea and China, among others – have prevented the refugees from moving to big cities that are already overcrowded.
One of those who have benefitted is Monira Khatun. At 29 she lost everything – her husband left her and her father died shortly thereafter, leaving her to care for three other family members. Without work, she was worried how she would feed them.
“I lost everything. There was darkness all around,” Khatun said. “My parents’ home was gone to the river from erosion, we had no land to cultivate.”
She ended up working at a newly built factory in Mongla along with thousands of other climate refugees and now doesn’t have to worry about where her family’s next meal is coming from. “Now I earn a good amount of money each month to support my family,” she said.
There are 10 more factories in the pipeline to start production soon in Mongla, adding thousands of jobs. Sheikh Abdur Rahman, mayor of Mongla, said the government is building new infrastructure in the seaport and dredging the Mongla river to widen its channel, allowing for big ships, while more investment is coming to the export processing zone. And – there is a new rail line being constructed to connect the town with a major land port across the border with neighboring India.
There were only 2,600 workers in Mongla in 2018, but now there are about 9,000. The changes are visible.
Bangladesh officials have plans to replicate the Mongla model to at least two dozen other coastal towns across Bangladesh, towns that can shelter up to another half a million climate migrants each. Good news indeed with climate scientists estimating 19 million climate refugees will exist in Bangladesh by 2050.
Excerpts from an Associated Press article published in the Columbia Tribune on April 1, 2022