Confronting climate-induced internal migration

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Wares Ali Khan:

Bangladesh is vulnerable to climate disasters and prone to fragility because of its geographical location. Due to sea-level rise, lack of safe drinking water, drought-like situations, river erosion, gradual loss of biodiversity, and effects of extreme weather—like heat waves, whimsical flash floods, and mighty cyclones—Bangladesh is at high risk of facing climate migration and experiencing unforeseen drawbacks in a greater context.

Excessive emission of carbon globally, the erratic presence of Methane in large volumes, and other greenhouse gases like—Nitrous Oxide, CFC, Ozone, etc.—have been transforming the earth’s surface into intensely hot and precarious in nature.

The industrially developed nations are largely responsible for such chronic creation of a greenhouse effect on the earth’s atmosphere. A country like Bangladesh, because of its inconvenient geo-position and geo-structural gaps, experiences the impacts of climate adversity enormously.

A study conducted by Action Aid discloses that by 2050, almost three million people in the country might be forced to migrate if global leaders fail to reduce global warming within a rise of two degrees since the pre-industrial period, a goal which was set by the Paris Agreement earlier.

It is the right time for our country to bargain with the global leaders on the grounds of limiting extra-spell carbon emissions with a view to securing a sustainable abode for us all.

We do not have sufficient backup resources and technical capacities to combat the impacts of climate change along with mitigating the real-time aftermaths and losses in gross. In this regard, our efforts to lessen the magnitude of climate vulnerability with our limited resources and state-applied adaptation mechanism will surely go harder.

As the water level of the Bay of Bengal has been in rising trend over the last couple of years, the intrusion of saltwater and salinity has compelled many of the coastal population to migrate elsewhere as a new way to survive. People of those climatologically threatened and calamities-prone districts/regions, on the whole, migrate to their preferred zones to survive afresh.

This climate-driven large scale human flow impacts life, resources and the economy holistically in multiplex modality and magnitude creating chaos in life, bringing assorted crises in the means of livelihood.

Most of the people living near the sea area depend on shrimp and fish cultivation, and salt production. Their means of survival rigorously get disrupted, destroyed, and threatened by whimsical and precarious natural disasters like—cyclones, floods, drought, erosion, extra spells of heat waves and cold waves, etc. almost every year.

As the nearby inshore land areas are not suitable enough for agriculture and cultivating green stuff, the climate victims frequently tire out with the limited scope of livelihood and search for alternative means of living.

We know that a good number of people experiencing climate adversities tend to migrate to the capital, Dhaka—the widely considered sheltering hub as a last resort—expecting a place to sleep and a job to be in placement. However, the overburdened city is incapable of tackling such a continuous influx of population forced by climate disasters.

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The present condition of Dhaka city regarding its dwelling standard is surely messed up, noisy, unhealthy, and suffocating. With the lack of the indexes of minimum living standard, the tag of being the densest as well as the poor quality city in the globe has been transfigured into a severe state of coping up endurance from being overburdened and outburst further.

Rehabilitation with extending livelihood provision and advantages for the climate-suffering community should be prioritized. To mitigate the risks of climate change and alleviate the prevailing impoverishment and fatality resulting from global climate change patterns, the necessary support from responsible and developed countries is also equally substantial.

Our concerned policy makers and state mechanisms have to think of adopting approaches and planned actions supporting climate migrants to mitigate the grand loss of their homes and jobs.

Since most of them are deprived of minimum scope for subsistence, the climate victims, losing all, gradually find their daily life execution tremendously measurable. This happens somehow in an abnormal state when the suffering masses are in obstacles framed with tightening reality.

Therefore, befitting initiatives taken to provide jobs and assurance of earnings will cut back the rate of climate vulnerability and migration tendency among the utterly huge floating folk, in search of a hope to stay alive.

Budgetary allocations should be augmented to scale down misery and protect the vulnerable population. By the way, a pragmatic investment in a fatty figure might be ensured to develop climate-resilient and climate-friendly infrastructures and to invent salt-tolerant crops in agriculture.

A far-reaching master scheme needs to take over for the sake of creating a substitute mode of earnings, which is veritably essential to feed the family. To generate the opportunity for livelihood, practical projects of launching vocational and technical training will determine a positive prospect for climate distress.

All quarters must limit greenhouse gas emissions to protect the planet Earth from the gradual threat of climate change. Policy assistance for framework formulation along with realistic plans has to be executed also in the country’s territory.

Albeit, it is no longer a sole issue for Bangladesh, yet we must practice green policies in respect of energy consumption and generation as well. Changing our lifestyle will work significantly, reducing the unnecessary emission of carbon in the homeland and beyond. It might work as the ‘good of evil’ as a last but not the least approach.

Pragmatic mitigation and adaptation schemes, foreign bodies’ negotiations, and raising voices for our homegrown rights to confront climate migration must be instituted by the state authority without fear and further delay. By the way, whatever we can, we ought to work in joint hands from our respective domains of interference against this grave shock in a stringent pattern surely and steadily.

The author is an academic

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