Who cares if Bangladesh drowns?

By JOEL ELLIOTT

Special to The Caravan


WATERVILLE, MAINE – The students arrived at the conference hall in a rush, dripping from the rain, some of them drenched from marching several kilometres from the Colby College campus in Waterville, Maine to express their solidarity with impoverished villagers nearly 13,000 kilometres away in a country most of the students had never visited.

But to them and their mentor, Bangladeshi human rights activist Afsan Chowdhury, the vast distance between the United States and Bangladesh was irrelevant to the fact that Bangladeshis a world away face drought, famine and floods. In Chowdhury's view, these disasters were caused by Western lifestyle choices, and could in turn have a dire impact on Americans themselves.

Chowdhury, wearing a button-down shirt, plain slacks and grey running shoes, chatted with journalists and activists as he watched the bedraggled group file into the building. Some students headed for coffee and donuts. Others perused photos on display showing Bangladeshi farmers wading thigh-deep through flooded streets, or tilling fields blighted by rising salinity levels – both, according to Chowdhury products of climate change brought on by unchecked emissions.

"I am always surprised when people show up at rallies," Chowdhury said, glancing around at the growing crowd. "I am happy when only one shows up. But they do, and when they do, it's magical."

A brief wait, and Chowdhury launched into his presentation.

Emissions from automobiles, power plants and burning forests increase the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere. These sources are "very likely" responsible for rising global temperatures, according to a 2007 report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Rising temperatures are melting the polar ice caps and raising sea levels, and, Chowdhury says, the catastrophic effects of these rising sea levels will hit – or rather, are already hitting – the poorest, and most vulnerable, people in the world.

People in the Western world should care about these harmful effects, not only because of the moral obligation to mitigate the harmful effects of their actions, but also because, ultimately, what hurts one group hurts everyone on the planet, Chowdhury said. "I just want to put a human face to climate change," he repeated frequently. "That's all I want to do."

It is especially important that people in the United States hear this, he said. With its grossly disproportionate use of energy (the country leads the world in carbon emissions, yet has a population only one-quarter that of India's 1.1 billion), the US could play a huge role in reducing or mitigating the effects of global warming. With the election of President-elect Barack Obama, an outspoken advocate of environmental protection, Americans have a chance to push for tougher restrictions on carbon emissions and to lobby for increased third-world aid to mitigate the effects of climate change in third world countries.

"It starts with the United States," he said. "This is an excellent time when we can say, 'We are one world' – whether you like it or not, we are one world."

The creation of Bangladesh in 1971 helped thrust Chowdhury, then a young man, into a life of human rights activism. Poverty and turmoil in the region helped create many injustices, leaving little free time for a human rights activist. Chowdhury, now 55 years old, has worked on a number of fronts over the years. He has campaigned for freedom of the press. He has produced studies on climate change, on the prevalence of AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases and on the sexual abuse of children. Not to mention, he’s also worked as an advocate for minority rights, refugee rights and gay rights.

For Chowdhury, the list of occupations goes on and on. He has worked for various non-governmental humanitarian organizations, including the United Nations Children's Fund, and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), and served as a policy adviser for OXFAM, the United Nations Development Program and the World Health Organization. At one point he worked as a director for BRAC, which bills itself as the world's largest non-governmental development organization, employing more than 120,000 people.

But, as he watched rising seas engulf Bangladeshi coastal villages and cyclones level them with increasing frequency, Chowdhury concluded that the rising threat of human-exacerbated climate change transcended all other issues. Soon, he was pouring all of his activism efforts the environment. In 2007, he filmed and produced a documentary on his country's plight called "Who Cares if Bangladesh Drowns?" This year, he was selected as Colby College's 2008 Oak Fellow at the school's Institute for the Study of International Human Rights in Waterville, Maine through the end of the year, he teaches students about global climate justice and shows them how to raise awareness of the issue by helping to organize rallies in New England and Canada.

"The primary human right is the right to live in a world that will survive," he said. Therefore, "climate-related rights have now become the most fundamental human right as far as I'm concerned."

Rising sea levels, an increasingly chaotic monsoon season and increasing salinity levels in the soil are threatening both people's livelihoods and lives by cutting into agricultural production, Chowdhury said. Two-thirds of Bangladeshis depend on agriculture for their incomes, with rice being the primary crop. As of yet, there may not be an outright famine, but poor Bangladeshis are already eating less. The entire region is facing a food severe food shortage this year, but Bangladesh will be especially hard-hit.

The world has grown to depend more heavily upon low-lying countries for their rice production, The New York Times reported earlier this year at the onset of the global rice shortage. In the last 25 years, most increases in rice production came in areas that were close to sea level, including countries like Bangladesh. Rising sea levels would threaten a huge portion of the world's rice supply.

But rising sea levels aren’t the only climate induced threats facing Bangladesh. One cyclone last year in Bangladesh killed several thousand and left about a million people homeless, the United Nations reported, and others have killed as many as 140,000 at once, The New York Times reported at the time. These powerful storms are very likely to increase in frequency as the earth warms, according to 2007 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was established by the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Program.
This assertion is at least partly corroborated by scientists at the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, a United States Government research department that studies the affects of climate change around the globe.

"Some recent scientific articles have reported a large increase in tropical cyclone energy, numbers, and wind-speeds in some regions during the last few decades in association with warmer sea surface temperatures," the department said in a 2006 statement on its Web site. "Other studies report that changes in observational techniques and instrumentation are responsible for these increases."

A statement from the World Meterological Organization, an agency of the United Nations, gave a similarly mixed assessment in a 2006.

"During 2005, two highly-publicized scientific papers appeared documenting evidence from the observational record for an increase in tropical cyclone activity," the statement reads, indicating a 100 percent increase in the number of cyclones in the past three decades. However, it goes on to say that some scientists attribute the reported increases to faulty or incomplete data, as many cyclones are missed or not counted.

Flooding, however, is the most graphic and obvious climate change-related problem Bangladesh faces. Situated on the Ganges Delta, the existence of the entire country revolves around tides, rains and river flow. Large portions throughout the entire region, including nearby Indian states, flood from time to time, but, according to Chowdhury, the problem is getting worse as the seas rise higher and higher.

Over the past half-century Bangladesh has devoted roughly 20 percent of its budget to water development projects in attempts both to keep floodwaters at bay and to irrigate farmlands with fresh water, according to the Bangladesh Environment Network (BEN), a Dhaka-based association of scientists and activists. Despite these efforts, flooding continues to ravage the country, and the problem is getting worse.

According to the BEN, the government of Bangladesh must outline a detailed, long-term plan to cope with climate change.
"Unless a national vision and agenda are developed through domestic introspection, outside money may not prove to be that beneficial for the country and particularly the people who will be affected the most, even though it may benefit some specific groups or individuals," the network said in a statement announcing a January 2 Conference on Climate Change in Dhaka.
Organizers aim to use the conference to hone their strategy to prod Bangladeshi policy-makers in this direction. Climate-change experts from Bangladesh and other countries plan to attend, as well as activists and political leaders.
“Our adaptation strategy will have to be based on the long-term historical experience of the Bengal delta, as well as short-term human-induced changes in land-use and water resources in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin” a separate draft report from BEN says. The report is being prepared by Dipen Bhattacharya, a physicist at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at University of California, Riverside, and a member of BEN. The report is a compilation of several scientific studies, and Bhattacharya in advance of the conference on climate change is collaborating with other scientists who are also members of the network. The report continues, “other solutions … will need extensive institutional and human capacity building initiatives including broad flood and cyclone warning and relief systems, exploration of climate-resilient cropping system and preparation against climate-related epidemics.”
“Bangladesh and India need to develop jointly a regional climate change program,” Bhattacharya said in an e-mail. “This includes … a joint supervision of the biologically diverse Sundarbans mangrove area.”
Even minor changes in sea levels often result in the flooding of entire villages, as overpopulation forces many to live on and cultivate areas that are frequently flooded. Environmental expert Stephan Faris wrote in The New York Times that if the sea rose a single meter it would flood one-seventh of the country. If that were to happen, it would displace more than 2 million people.

Displacement on this scale and worse is already happening, as seen in the 2004 flooding that killed hundreds, destroyed the homes of millions, and left hospitals reeling before an onslaught of tens of thousands of cases of diarrhoea contracted from contact with contaminated water.

In producing his film documentary (which can be found on YouTube), Chowdhury and a small team journeyed to the villages along the coast that are hardest-hit by rising seas. Villagers are seen, first wading through village streets, then poling along on rafts as salt water surges over their homes. Entire islands have disappeared in recent years beneath the waves of the Bay of Bengal, Chowdhury said, pointing out treetops poking from the water – all that was visible of a massive mangrove forest that was drowning in the rising tide. In November, the Agence France-Presse reported that several islands along Bangladesh’s were shrinking as the seas rise to envelop them, and that villagers were fleeing to the mainland and further inland to escape. IRIN, a news agency that focuses on humanitarian issues in Asia and other parts of the world, reported in October that rising seas had claimed more than 15 kilometres of previously-dry land on Kutubdia, an island of the coast of south eastern Bangladesh.
Villagers told Chowdhury they could see the sea's approach. As the seas rise higher, Chowdhury explained the threat of a massive, panicked immigration on an unprecedented scale comes closer to becoming a reality.

"It's so easy to ignore Bangladesh when it drowns," he said to the camera in his documentary. "It's so easy to ignore the poor when they drown … The bad news: this is going to happen more and more."

The problem of climate change, exacerbated by the West's appetite for petroleum, could come full-circle if the disenfranchised, destitute refugees succumbed to the wooing of the militant terrorist groups that are known to prey on poorer, less-educated segments of society. Terrorism "could be one of the most deadly by-products of climate change," Chowdhury said.

In the view held by Chowdhury and many scientists, carbon emissions (mostly coming from the West) are melting the polar ice caps and raising sea levels. Rising sea levels endanger the world's poorest, and most helpless, such as Bangladeshis living in fishing villages along the coasts of the Bay of Bengal. The low-lying country is one of the most densely-populated in the world, with about 1,147 people per square kilometre, according to the latest statistics from the CIA Factbook.

When conditions in large portions of Bangladesh become unliveable, their problem will become India's problem, Chowdhury predicts, as millions of refugees will flee Bangladesh and head across the border. India, with its own significant overpopulation troubles, would not be equipped to accommodate such a sudden influx. Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, is already swamped with internally-displaced refugees. The city's infrastructure already cannot handle them.

Refugees, like the rising floodwaters, will flow wherever they can, often with powerful and destructive results.

Urban centres in the Indian states of Assam, West Bengal and Tripura likely would receive the heaviest burden of refugees from Bangladesh, although cities such as Mumbai would also be hard-hit. Their proximity makes them likely destinations, but they, too, are already filled with immigrants and refugees from Bangladesh.

The recent carnage in Mumbai received top billing in news reports, especially when evidence emerged that the terrorists had Pakistan roots. Likewise, many of India’s past attacks have also been linked to Pakistani terrorists.

But Islamist militants have made steady, and less-publicized, recruiting progress in Bangladesh as well, using it as a launching point for cross-border attacks. Bombings and shootings in India's far northeast may not get as much attention as those that take place in the country's financial centre, but they are just as deadly.
The violence will only increase if rising sea levels send more streams of Bangladeshi refugees toward India, Chowdhury said. Bhattacharya, the physicist representing BEN, agrees.
“A lot of people are saying this, I think Afsan Chowdhury is right,” Bhattacharya said. “It is a very sensitive subject, but I think he is right – I think you will not see too many quotations to the effect that this will result in mass unrest, but I think it is true.”
India could attempt to defer the problem by barring its gates to Bangladeshis, but this would backfire, Chowdhury said. It would be difficult or impossible to keep out that many displaced people. And regardless of which side of the border they landed, the presence of that many unemployed, starving people would threaten the stability and security of the entire region.

"All of these (north eastern Indian states) are very unstable political regions, because all of these areas have insurgencies," Chowdhury said. "They are destabilized, and the great factor is immigration from Bangladesh. It's been going on, it's been gradual immigration, but it's accelerating. That is a major crisis."

In November, a march in Dhaka drew hundreds of women to protest what they see as a lack of initiative on the part of leaders of the world's superpowers to curb emissions. The rally in Waterville drew a couple of dozen students and college faculty. Occasionally, as Chowdhury made his presentation, a few residents on their way to a nearby coffee shop would glance over at the group. Few stopped.

It will be worth watching to see how Chowdhury's message resonates here in the United States, and whether the general public will grasp the connection between their energy use and the potential displacement of hundreds of millions of people on the other side of the globe.

While the initial gathering in Waterville was small, hints of a growing movement emerged. One woman approached Chowdhury afterward and offered to help him connect with the Maine Council of Churches, a religious association that rallies communities on environmental and other issues.

"This is good," Chowdhury said in response. "If the churches support it, it has gone mainstream. It won't be seen as a view from the fringe."

In addition, several students formed a group, called Students for Climate Justice, with the intent to continue Chowdhury's activist work from the Colby College campus. Amelia Swinton, a junior at Colby College who is studying anthropology and Latin American studies, is a student of Chowdhury's, and assisted him in orchestrating the rally.

"The urgency of the issue is obvious," Swinton said. "And it's important that we come together with collective action and advocate on behalf of people who have no voice."