The poorest of the poor in Bangladesh are on the move due to the climate crisis. I will state the obvious, Bangladeshis are not white caucasians. Therefore, not many here in the West give a rats ass that they are.
They are vulnerable, desperately poor, lack education and are brown skinned. These migrants will never be able to immigrate to London, Sydney, Tokyo or Vancouver. They are on their own, and they want to live as much as the next person. But they are forced to abandon their homes and move to areas that have their own climate issues - because of the emissions from fossil fuels that the west and other industrial economies have been spewing into the atmosphere for centuries. An exploding population and changing rainfall patterns promise complete and utter chaos.
Their plight offers the industrialized nations a glimpse on how to prepare for our own looming migrant impacts on the horizon (and no that does not include a wall). We would be wise to start taking notes.
In the United States, migration of millions will not come only from Central America, but from Florida and the rest of the Gulf states. Who knows, people in the midwest and northeast may need to move south due to the polar vortex. It is going to be a worldwide mess.
Already migrating to escape sea level rise impacts from the melting polar regions such as typhoons, stronger monsoons, erosion, salt infiltration poisoning cropland, along with increasing heat and humidity, even drought, are forcing Bangladeshis into an impossible situation in the slums of Dhaka.
National Geographic has the story.
Bangladesh, a densely populated, riverine South Asian nation, has always survived its share of tropical storms, flooding, and other natural disasters. But today, climate change is accelerating old forces of destruction, creating new patterns of displacement, and fueling an explosion of rapid, chaotic urbanization. A report last week from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the State Department and other foreign aid agencies have not done enough to combat climate change-induced migration in developing countries, and highlighted Bangladesh as particularly vulnerable. And as climate change drives the migration of up to 200 million people worldwide by 2050, Dhaka offers a cautionary tale for refuge cities around the globe.
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“People have always coped with flooding, and they learned how to cope with death,” Siddiqui says. “But with climate change, many of the damages are permanent. So you have to adapt to a new way of life.” (Learn about Bangladesh’s floating hospital.)
Climate change is disrupting traditional rain patterns—droughts in some areas, unexpected deluges in others—and boosting silt-heavy runoff from glaciers in the Himalaya Mountains upstream, leading to an increase in flooding and riverbank erosion. Every year, an area larger than Manhattan washes away. Meanwhile, sea-level rise is pushing saltwater into coastal agricultural areas and promising to permanently submerge large swaths.
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As people flee vulnerable coastal areas, most are arriving in urban slums—particularly in Dhaka, one of the world’s fastest-growing and most densely populated megacities. The city is perceived as the country’s bastion of economic opportunity, but it is also fraught with extreme poverty, public health hazards, human trafficking, and other risks, including its own vulnerability to floods. Already, up to 400,000 low-income migrants arrive in Dhaka every year.
“Dhaka is filled with people who fled their village because it was swallowed by the sea or the rivers,” Huq says. “The coming millions will be impossible to absorb.”
Bangladesh’s Climate Migration Crisis
CURWOOD: So, there are monsoons there in South Asia, it's nothing new to Bangladesh. People there time and time again, survive sometimes horrific monsoons and rebuild. What's changed what's different now?
MCDONNELL: There's a few things that are different. In some cases, the impacts that people are experiencing are new. For example, this kind of saltwater intrusion that I mentioned. Because of sea level rise, salt water coming into coastal areas that are really predominantly agricultural. People have fish farms and rice paddies there and salt water has had a huge impact on people's ability to grow crops and fish in that area. And there was a study that actually just came out in November, indicating that in the next few decades, hundreds of thousands of people could be displaced just because of that salt water impact alone. So, that's a kind of new impact. In other cases, as you mentioned, some of these impacts are things that people who have been living in this Ganges River Delta have been dealing with for 10s of thousands of years. Riverbank erosion is nothing new. Tropical storms are not new. You mentioned the monsoons, of course, not new. But it's really the rate that these things are happening and the kind of scale of impact. And, also, one thing that climate change does is it tends to disrupt the rainfall patterns, the seasonal rainfall patterns. So, you're getting rain at times, when you don't expect it, you're not getting rain at times when you think that it should be coming. So it's really throwing off the course of the monsoon, sometimes strengthening the monsoon. So it's just kind of throwing a wrench in all of the works of these natural cycles that people are used to. And then, of course, in the background of that, you have really high rates of population growth. So at the same time that these environmental catastrophes are happening, you just have more people who are exposed to the challenge. And that leads to an increase in the level of displacement.
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CURWOOD: So, if the weather systems are messed up, how are people eating? How are people able to grow the food they need?
MCDONNELL: One thing that you see in the coastal regions that I visited was people switching rice paddies over to shrimp farming, which tends to be a little bit more tolerant of the salt. So, people kind of are experimenting with different ways of growing crops, I met a few farmers who are experimenting with trying to grow salt-tolerant rice. So, there's a kind of science and adaptation element here where people are looking for new opportunities, you know, trying to kind of fill in where they can. One of the problems with shrimp farming, interestingly, is that it's more tolerant to salt, but it employs far fewer people. You could have one shrimp farm that, you know, the same area, if you are growing rice, you could maybe employ 100 people. For shrimp farm, you're just employing one or two, it's very kind of low maintenance. And, again, so that's where you start to see these climate impacts bleed over into economic impacts. And it starts to kind of blur the line between people who are climate refugees or disaster refugees and economic migrants.
Bangladeshis will be migrating over international borders. Burmese already are, they are fleeing to Bangladesh. At some point the Indian sub-continent will empty - an event we will be forced to watch whether we want to or not.
Meanwhile the powers that be and climate change deniers laugh.