Last September, in Bangladeshi government 8 million people in 32 districts had been affected by floods, with 307,000 people staying in emergency shelters and 1,945 medical teams deployed. In addition, 103,855 houses had been destroyed, with a further 633,792 partially damaged, and 4,636 schools – and several hundred thousand acres of farmland flooded.
The monsoon floods were severe in 2017, but it was steady, incremental sea-level rise, that seemed to be the culprit.
An Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) report says that tens of thousands of Bangladeshi families face becoming refugees in their own land. Dhaka and other large cities are already home to a growing number of environmental refugees. The number of people living in slums has increased by more than 60% in the past 17 years in Bangladesh. Many of the new arrivals are ‘climate refugees’ – people forced to leave their homes due to extreme weather events related to climate change. No one knows exactly how many Bangladeshis are forced to move each year by temporary flooding caused by extreme storms, or by permanent flooding caused by a rise in sea level. But it could be up to 250,000 people a year, says the EJF. Linking migration directly to climate change is difficult, say academics, because people move for many reasons. But Bangladesh, officially, expects 25-30 million people to move within the next 50 years, or nearly one in six of its present population.
“Ever more frequent storms, river erosion and salinity intrusion are forcing people from their homes and destroying their lands. And as with so many of the effects of climate change we are seeing today, this is just the start of something far larger,” says the report. "...While catastrophic storms like Aila [ 2009] or Sidr [2007] make headlines, so many of these families are being forced from their homes by … relentless, ever rising tides. This is everyday climate change at work: a slow-onset shift in environmental conditions that is destroying lives and livelihoods before our eyes,” says the report.
“We are a state that is greatly threatened by the impacts of climate change,” says Munir Muniruzzaman (left), chair of the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change and a former military adviser to the president of Bangladesh. “It has been estimated by the UN IPCC’s reports and analysis that a one-metre sea level rise in the south of the country will entail a 17-20% loss of territory to the sea, meaning that Bangladesh will lose up to 20% of its current landmass. It is going to create a very large climate refugee population.”
He warns that the country will be unable to cope. “The internal capacity of the state, given its size and resources, to absorb such a large displacement of the human population and large number of climate refugees certainly does not exist in the country. Therefore, we are not only going to see internal destabilisation due to large-scale displacement of people, but there will be transboundary migration of climate refugees into the neighbouring countries,” says Muniruzzaman.
But environmental migrants are not recognised as refugees and have none of the legal protections guaranteed by the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention.
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