Climate change creates a new migration crisis for Bangladesh

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. 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. 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. 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.” 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.) 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. 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.