National Geographic - Tim McDonnell
The country, already grappling with the Rohingya crisis, now faces a devastating migration problem as hundreds of thousands face an impossible choice between battered coastlines and urban slums.
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| A woman in Bangladesh uses bales of straw to try to protect a riverbank that is eroding away from floodwaters. Much of the country is ground zero for a global climate crisis. Photograph by G.M.B. Akash, Panos Pictures/Redux |
Dhaka, Bangladesh - Golam Mostafa Sarder
starts every day before dawn, rising from a thin reed mat in the shed
that he shares with fifteen roommates. Each has just enough space to lie
flat. He dresses in gym shorts and t-shirt by the light of a single
dangling bulb.Outside the shed’s open doorway, in the outskirts of
Dhaka,
the sprawling megacity capital of Bangladesh, is the brick factory
where Golam and his neighbors work for fifteen hours a day, seven days a
week, at least six months a year. His home in Gabura, a remote village
on the country’s southwestern coast, is more than a day’s journey from
the city by bus, rickshaw, and ferry.
Golam’s job is to push wheelbarrows of mud down the production line.
Waist-high rows of drying bricks spiral off from a towering kiln that
belches smoke over an area the size of a city block. By 6 p.m. his lanky
frame is spattered in gray mud. The evening air swims with mosquitoes.
He has just enough strength left to clean his bare feet and angular
face, inhale a dinner of lentils and rice, and collapse back onto his
mat.
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| A teenage boy works at a brick field in Bhola, Bangladesh. Brick fields in urban areas are a common destination for coastal climate migrants, especially young men. Photograph by Mahmud Hossain Opu |
Golam has never heard of
global warming. But he says he knows one thing for sure: “If the river didn’t take our land, I wouldn’t need to be here."
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.
Interviews with dozens of migrant families, scientists, urban
planners, human rights advocates, and government officials across
Bangladesh reveal that while the country is keenly aware of its
vulnerability to climate change, not enough has been done to match the
pace and scale of the resultant displacement and urbanization, toppling
any prospect of a humane life for one of the world’s largest populations
of climate migrants.
“Right now the government’s vision is to have no vision,” says Tasneem Siddiqui, a political scientist who leads the
Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit at the University of Dhaka. “It’s just that everything is in Dhaka, and people are all coming to Dhaka. And Dhaka is collapsing.”
Climate-driven displacement
Bangladesh holds 165 million people in an area smaller than Illinois.
One-third of them live along the southern coast, a lush honeycomb of
island villages, farms, and fish ponds linked by protective embankments.
Most of the country’s land area is no higher above sea level than New
York City, and during the rainy season more than one-fifth of the
country can be flooded at once.
For tens of thousands of years, people living in the
vast Ganges Delta
accepted a volatile, dangerous landscape of floods and tropical storms
as the cost of access to rich agricultural soil and lucrative maritime
trade routes.
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| Forida
Khatun stands behind her house in Gabura, Bangladesh, in November. Two
of her sons migrated to Dhaka after the family home was destroyed by
storms multiple times and agricultural jobs were lost due to salinity
intrusion. “Only Allah can save us," she says. "We don’t have any power
to save our children.” Photograph by Tim McDonnell |
“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.
Over the last decade, nearly 700,000 Bangladeshis were displaced on average each year by natural disasters,
according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre.
That number spikes in years with catastrophic cyclones, like 2009’s
Aila, which displaced millions of people and killed more than 200. But
even in relatively calm years, there is a rising drumbeat of
displacement as sea-level rise, erosion, salinity intrusion, crop
failures, and repeat inundation make life along the coast untenable.
Overall, the number of Bangladeshis displaced by the varied impacts
of climate change could reach 13.3 million by 2050, making it the
country’s number-one driver of internal migration, according to a March
2018
World Bank report.
“On the coast, we can predict with great certainty that many people
living there now will simply not be able to continue there, because
their livelihoods will be lost,” says Saleemul Huq, director of the
Dhaka-based
International Centre for Climate Change and Development and one of the country’s leading climate scientists.
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.”
How migration happens
Today, city planners,
policymakers,
scientists, and farmers are reinforcing embankments, innovating home
design, rebuilding communities, building shelters, and cultivating
salt-tolerant rice seeds, among other actions. But they’re moving too
slowly to help many people like Golam, who survived a series of
catastrophic storms only to find that migration was the only viable path
remaining
.
Golam was a child the first time his family’s house was destroyed. He
was too young to remember the wind ripping out his father’s fruit
trees, floodwaters carrying off tea and rice from the family’s small
shop, the mud walls crumbling, him taking shelter with his mother in a
neighbor’s house and then, when that too washed away, falling into an
empty grave as they ran from the raging riverbank in the dark.
A second storm several years later took their next house. And a third, after that: Cyclone
Aila
washed away not only the latest house and everything in it, but also
the land on which it stood, the family’s last piece of property.
After Aila, Golam’s family was homeless, landless, with almost no
possessions, and awash in high-salinity water that would silently
sabotage fishing and agriculture for the next decade. For a young man
with a third-grade education, the brick factory and its promise of hard
cash became the only way to feed his family.
“In my childhood, no one used to come out here for work,” he says.
“But now, from my village, nearly every family sends at least one
person.”
Golam’s family sent two: A couple years ago, his younger brother
joined him. Each earns just shy of $1,500 in six months, his total
income for the year.
Their only time off is when it rains. On those days, they take a bus
to the international airport and stand outside the perimeter fence to
watch planes fly in and out, and imagine where they might be going.
“I hope God will look at me kindly,” Golam says, “and change my luck.” (
Learn about Bangladesh’s shipbreakers.)
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| Young
men relax on a flood gate in the booming port town of Mongla,
Bangladesh. The city aims to recreate itself as a magnet for climate
migrants, with investments in sea walls and other adaptive
infrastructure, factories and other job opportunities, as well as public
services like affordable housing, schools, and hospitals. Photograph by Mahmud Hossain Opu |
A city of climate change slums
For climate migrants who arrive in Dhaka, life is seldom easy. Men
and boys work in brick factories, drive rickshaws, and build
skyscrapers. Women and girls clean houses, stitch Western fashions, and
raise families—often fending off sexual violence at multiple steps along
the way. Education is a luxury; rent is preposterous. Eviction can come
as suddenly as a collapsing riverbank. Home feels very far away.
Sahela Begum, 34, lost her husband to a heart attack in February. She
managed to support their four daughters off his life savings for a few
months in a town called Naria, on the banks of the Padma River. Then she
lost their house. On a sticky evening in August, the riverbank it was
on crumbled, sending it downstream along with a dozen of her neighbors’
houses.
“When my house was going in the water, I felt like I was having a
stroke and might die,” she says. “When we lost the house, we ran out of
options.”
Within a week, she left with her daughters for Dhaka, several hours
upstream. They managed to find a room in a slum called Kamrangirchar,
near the city center, in a dead-end alleyway behind a cacophonous fabric
market built over an old trash dump. She pays around $40 a month,
seventy percent of the salary she earns doing domestic work every day,
for a darkened, ten-by-ten-foot concrete room under a stairway. Her
oldest daughter, 13, also does domestic work, while the 11-year-old
stays home to care for the 6- and 9-year-olds. They share three toilets
and one four-burner stove with twelve other families living in the
alley.
Forty percent of the city’s residents live in slums like this,
hundreds of which are spread across the city. According to the
International Organization for Migration, up to
seventy percent of the slums’ residents moved there due to environmental challenges.
Slums emerge unplanned and unsanctioned in the backyards of glassy
skyscrapers, straddling railroad tracks, on stilts above water-logged
floodplains, on the fringes of construction sites. Single beds are
frequently shared by five or more family members. Sewage runs freely.
Structure fires
spread easily.
Most electricity, when it’s working at all, is tapped illegally from
the grid. Insect infestations are inescapable. Skin and gastrointestinal
diseases transmitted by dirty water are
routine,
and the infant mortality rate is twice that of rural areas. Rent money
flows into a real estate black market controlled by corrupt local
officials and businessmen.
“It’s very hard to get a living here,” Begum says. “But my life is my
childrens’ life. If I can make a good future for them, that’s the best
thing I can hope for.” (
Read about Bangladesh's Rohingya refugee crisis, which also has roots in environmental degradation.)
Cities for climate migrants
When Bangladesh gained independence in 1971, the population was 91
percent rural. But as the country began to pivot from an agricultural
economy to one diversified into manufacturing and other urban
industries, Dhaka exploded. Today, nearly one-third of the population
lives in cities, and Dhaka’s population is nearly triple that of the
country’s next three biggest cities combined. The city holds 47,500
people per square kilometer, nearly twice the population density of
Manhattan.
Throughout that process of growth, “low-income people were totally
left out of the development framework of the city,” says A.Q.M. Mahbub,
an urban studies researcher at the University of Dhaka. Affordable
housing, and public transit connecting the city center to suburbs as is
common in megacities in India and China, were never priorities.
Local officials still tend to view slum dwellers as illegal
squatters, rather than residents with a right to basic services. Tariq
bin Yousuf, a senior official at the Dhaka City Corporation, a
government agency that manages the city’s infrastructure, says that
while the city has plans to build more affordable housing, it prefers to
leave slum residents reliant on aid from local and international
non-governmental organizations.
“If we invest money directly in slum areas, or give them an
electricity supply, they will start to think, ‘O.K., we have these
facilities, so we have the ownership of this land,’” he says. “Once we
give them improved services, they become permanent.”
Many of the country’s leading public policy experts think that
attitude—that climate migrants are a regrettable burden—is
short-sighted.
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| Mohammed
Kabir Hossain, who drives a rickshaw, is one of many climate migrants
who were attracted to Mongla as an alternative to Dhaka. “Because of
salinity and flooding, there’s not much opportunity in my village. But
here, I can make good money,” he says. Photograph by Mahmud Hossain Opu |
“Climate change and migration you cannot stop,” the University of
Dhaka’s Siddiqui says. “But you can turn them into an opportunity for
development.”
Mongla, a booming port town on the country’s south-central coast, is
testing that theory by embarking on an urban overhaul that aims to turn
it into a magnet for climate migrants. It’s one of several emerging
“secondary cities,” models of climate-savvy urban planning where
investments in sea walls and other adaptive infrastructure are being
paired with factories and other blue-collar job opportunities, as well
as public services like affordable housing, schools, and hospitals.
“There’s no way to stop people coming to Dhaka unless we can attract
them to other places,” Huq says. “The next ten million could go to these
secondary towns. The girls and boys of today, the next generation of
citizens.”
Mongla has the right ingredients, planners hope. It has a
well-established deepwater port, surrounded by a sprawling industrial
area with cement factories, diesel fuel mass storage facilities, and two
dozen factories with jobs for 4,300 workers producing everything from
luggage and electronics to packaged snacks and mannequins. Located in
the center of the country’s coastal belt, it’s big enough to offer
opportunities but small enough that there’s room to grow.
“We have a master plan for making the city more functional and
beautiful,” says Mohammed Alauddin, Mongla’s deputy mayor. “People used
to have to leave Mongla to find work. Now they’re coming to work in
industry, and staying because of the good living conditions.”
So far, local officials have invested in two flood-control
gates;
a freshwater treatment and distribution system that Alauddin says has
increased the number of houses with running water from one-third of the
city’s total to one-half; eleven kilometers of pedestrian-friendly
riverside brick pathways; two dozen closed-circuit security cameras; a
citywide loudspeaker system that can announce inclement weather and
broadcast motivational pop music; and four thousand shade trees. Several
new apartment towers are under construction, as well as a watchtower
from which tourists can peer into the nearby Sundarban mangrove forest.
The investments appear to be paying off. In the last five years, the
population has jumped nearly sixty percent to 110,000, and the price of
land has skyrocketed. The industrial area is across a river from the
town center, and every evening at rush hour the river is jammed with
ferries on which passengers stand shoulder to shoulder. And the town’s
reputation is spreading.
“Because of salinity and flooding, there’s not much opportunity in my
village. But here, I can make good money,” says Mohammed Kabir Hossain,
who drives a rickshaw from the industrial area to the ferry station. He
came to Mongla a few years ago from Koyra on the southwestern coast. “A
lot of people are coming here from across southern Bangladesh,
especially those who are unwilling to go to Dhaka.”
‘Only Allah can save us’
At Golam’s family home in Gabura, two low wooden buildings frame a
courtyard that opens onto a constellation of rectangular shrimp ponds
stretching to the horizon. Immediately behind it is a crumbling ten-foot
embankment, no more than three feet across, paved with the same gray
bricks that Golam and men from every family here labor far from home to
produce. Behind the embankment, a river divides civilization from the
uninhabitable Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest. The
family lives in fear that their house—on a tiny wedge rented from the
village—will again wash away.
Forida Khatun, Golam’s mother, shares her son’s angular face. She
crouches against the exterior wall of the house wrapped in a purple sari
with yellow flowers, her arms shimmering in silvery bracelets, shooing
away a nosy chicken. In a high, thin voice she recalls how Golam was an
energetic, devious child, always in trouble. He loved boats, and once
took a canoe out into the mangroves for so long that he was too
exhausted to row himself home. That time, Khatun was able to dispatch a
few older boys from the neighborhood to rescue him. Now, she worries
that he’s slipped away from her for good.
“If we had the land still, if the salinity was less, our sons could
have managed to stay,” she says. “Only Allah can save us. We don’t have
any power to save our children.”
Here, land is wealth, and the family has none left. At the same time,
salinity has poisoned the job market as much as it has the water and
soil: Many wealthier farmers have converted their rice paddies—a
reliable opportunity for paid labor—into salt-tolerant shrimp ponds,
which essentially care for themselves.
The corrosive effect of salinity on local agricultural economies
could displace up to 200,000 people from coastal Bangladesh, a November
study from the International Food Policy Research Institute found. That exodus is already well underway in Gabura.
“Because of climate change, the job opportunities are reducing,” says
Isharat Jahan Mintu, the chairman of the village government. “And the
huge risk of natural disasters makes people want to go to safer areas.”
Mintu estimates that the high tide is rising by one foot per year on
average, and that one-third of the village’s farmable acres have been
rendered useless by salinity. Farmers are reluctant to bring more than a
fraction of their useable acres into cultivation, for fear of seeing
their entire nest egg washed away at once and local banks, seeing the
same risk, are stingy with loans. As a result, up to two-thirds of the
village’s men, including Golam, have left to find work in Dhaka and
other cities either temporarily or for good.
As a generation of young people loses faith in what was once one of
the most richly productive regions of South Asia, those who remain worry
that the village’s social fabric will be irreparably damaged. Families
are fragmented, children grow up without fathers, and lifelong neighbors
turn against one another over land. Parts of the embankment resemble
ghost towns, lined with boarded-up shops. No one wants to leave, but
many see no way to stay.
“Migration is very emotional,” Mintu says. “It makes an emptiness in the heart of the village.”
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