On the day the Copenhagen talks opened I was at Dhaka University listening to a debate on the role of government and community members in the fight against climate change. The debate took place outside, in the university campus, with a number of student activists taking part. Half way through the debate, a large march interrupted the participants, with hundreds of protesters waiving banners demanding that the world’s leaders take action on climate change.
If I’m totally honest, before moving to Bangladesh I found it hard to get passionate about the whole climate change thing. The stereotype of middle class hippies eating organic food and dreading their hair is, I’m afraid, one I secretly bought into. I’ve found it much easier to get passionate about other things: housing for the homeless, sex worker rights, the immigration system, IMF policy in Latin America; these issues seeming much more tangible and much more pressing.
Moving to Bangladesh has made me wake up, take notice a bit more, and I have finally found the human story behind the science, statistics and organic locally produced apples.
Watching hundreds of students march suddenly became moving for me, as moving as hearing a refugee talk about why they fled their country, because I’ve suddenly realized how much of this country will be displaced if we let things continue. To me talk of rising temperatures and sea levels has never meant much. Suddenly it is hyper-real: if sea levels rise by 88cm, 170 million people in the country I live in will be displaced. Here’s an exert from yesterdays Daily Star:
“’The weather has changed, the sea has changed’ says Sushil Jaladash, an old fisherman who has stopped going to the sea for the last two years. ‘Waves have become larger and the sea is strangely warm, storms have become frequent’. The money lenders who gave him loans have taken his boat, he failed to complete trips to the sea because of the frequent storms. What will he do now? He has no answer. He looks blank. Just as Pia Rani and Ranjan and hundreds of other fishermen and their families at Taros Vanga village”
As climate change washes away much of Bangladesh, millions are left without land, and are unable to feed themselves. Mass migration to urban areas takes place, and you are left with cities like Dhaka, big sprawling urban messes that simply cannot contain the number of people who flock to it. Electricity cuts become more frequent; slums grow; more and more children become orphaned adding to the already 600,000 plus street children living in Dhaka. More women will travel to the capital to work in garments factories as a way to feed their children, working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, for less than $30 per month. Family networks will break-down; clinic waiting times will be longer; schools full, stomachs empty.
I have only been here for a short while but I can already see that Bangladesh is a country teetering on the edge of disaster. The social costs of even one more village being displaced by climate change will be devastating, the cost of millions displaced impossible to comprehend. So i’d like to raise my voice with those of you who’ve been doing it for a while, the ones who didn’t get that easyjet flight to Paris with me, the ones who told me off for throwing food in the bin, for letting the tap run, not turning off the hall light-you know who you are. I’d like to commend you for not being as short sighted as me, for seeing that the things I got passionate about were totally and irrevocably connected to the number of flight I took, to the number of Argentinean steak’s from Sainsbury’s I ate. Sorry. Thank you.
