From the Chicago Tribune:
Muhammad Ali, a wiry 65-year-old, has never driven a car, run an air conditioner or done much of anything that produces greenhouse gases. But on a warming planet, he is on the verge of becoming a climate refugee….
Bangladesh, which has 140 million people packed into an area a little smaller than Illinois, is one of the most vulnerable places to climate change. As the sea level slowly rises, this nation that is little more than a series of low-lying delta islands amid some of Asia’s mightiest rivers — the Ganges, Jamuna-Brahmaputra and Meghna — is seeing saltwater creep into its coastal soils and drinking water. Farmers near the Bay of Bengal who once grew rice now are raising shrimp.
Notorious for its deadly cyclones, Bangladesh is likely to face increasingly violent storms as the weather warms and see surging seas carry saltwater farther and farther up the country’s rivers, ruining soils, according to scientists.
Land disputes, many driven by erosion [caused by accelerating glacier melt and unusually heavy rains], now account for 77 percent of Bangladesh’s legal suits. In the dry northwest of the country, droughts are getting more severe. And if sea level rises by 3 feet by the turn of the century, as some scientists predict, a fifth of the country will disappear….
With so many huge rivers discharging into the ocean, the country couldn’t build dikes to hold back the sea even if it had the money, Rahman said. And though it has created virtually none of the pollution driving global warming, it is unlikely to receive the international assistance it needs to adapt to conditions created by others.
What that might mean for big polluting nations such as the United States, China and India is that “for every hundred thousand tons of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family,” Rahman said, only half joking. India already is building a fence along its border with Bangladesh….
Bangladesh’s government is doing what it can to prepare for coming hard times. With the help of non-profit organizations, it is testing new salt-resistant crops, building thousands of raised shelters to protect those in the path of cyclones and trying to elevate roads and bridges above rising rivers. Leaders who once insisted that the West created the problem and should clean it up “now accept we should prepare,” Nishat said.The alternative could be ugly: insufficient food, a destabilized government, internal strife that could spread past the country’s borders, a massive exodus of climate refugees and more extremism, Rahman said.
“A person victimized and displaced will not sit idle,” he predicted. “There will be organized climate-displaced groups saying, ‘Why should you hang onto your place when I’ve lost mine and you’re the one who did this?’
“That,” he said, “is not a pleasant scenario.”
Note: while many scientists predict sea level rise of 3 feet by 2100, some mainstream scientists are predicting 3 feet by the third quarter of the century.
Dhaka, Bangladesh – Dhaka and its metropolitan area have a population of 11 million
please help them
The organisation call world Passport should be issued to all Bangladeshi people and allow them to live anywhere in the world without any obligation. Bangladesh govt should request U.N to mass migration to less densly populated country Like Canada, Australia, America, Africa.
Govt should float a share for people and raise capital for building Damn, and bariers in low land and build like Holland and other country. Get the Example Euro tunnel.
Mush
London
“mass migration to less densly populated country Like Canada, Australia, America, Africa. ” — You will make all these places Bangladesh