Climate change is causing people to move and we are having to deal with this very, very quickly Prof Saleemul Huq It aims to divert people to smaller urban centres with the capacity to expand and, crucially, jobs to sustain a rapidly growing workforce. Home to 20 million people, over a third of whom live in slums lacking even the most basic infrastructure, the city is dangerously overcrowded.Īgainst this grim backdrop of daily struggles and looming catastrophe, Prof Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), has formulated a vision of “transformative adaptation” to alleviate pressure on Dhaka and its conurbations. Most of those forced to leave their homes head to the capital, Dhaka, one of the fastest growing megacities in the world and among the least liveable. As of 2019 4.1 million people were displaced in the country as a result of climate-induced disasters. A recent World Bank report predicted that the country will have 19.9 million internal climate refugees by 2050, almost half the projected number for the entire south Asia region.Ī woman walks in the ruins of a house destroyed by floodwaters near Dhaka. But catastrophic weather events are speeding up the waves of people flowing into the urban centres.Īccording to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 4.1 million people (2.5% of the population) were displaced in Bangladesh as a result of climate-induced disasters as of 2019. There is nothing new in the country’s rural poor moving to cities in search of work. It’s safer here, there isn’t crime, there are jobs and the living standards are better.”īangladesh is an internal migration pressure cooker. They work here in the EPZ, for tourism in the Sundarbans, instead of going to places like Chittagong.
“These people crossing, they’re all from other places, from the villages near the Sundarbans. He used to row manually but says all the boats have motors now, with each carrying about 700 people a day across the river, on their way to work in the export zone or in Sundarbans tourism.
“We used to have a lot of problems after rains the roads would be flooded, we had very little infrastructure around here.” It has all changed,” says Abdul Jalil, a 52-year-old boatman on the Mongla River. The roads, the docks, the number of people coming here. “In my 30 years here I’ve seen so many changes. Abdul Jalil, 52, ferries people across the river to the export zone.