SINGAPORE – Bangladesh faces a double crisis of excessive climate errors and a pandemic that has killed thousands of people so far.
In addition to fighting the heaviest rains in years, the South Asian country is also suffering from involving the coronavirus outbreak that has hampered recovery efforts and hit the job prospects.
The other people most vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic are the same people who “live on the front line of climate change,” Afsari Begum, senior crisis threat relief specialist at progressive charity Practical Action, told CNBC.
“We are concerned that many other people will fall into poverty due to coronavirus. If communities are hit by storms and severe flooding that destroy or damage homes, farmland, schools, and hospitals, it will only make things worse,” he said in a statement. commissioned through the Zurich Flood Resistance Alliance, which aims to develop flood resistance for countries.
Bangladesh’s annual monsoon season lasts from June to September, according to official ministry sources.
In May, Cyclone Amphan, Bangladesh’s most intense cyclone in two decades, devastated coastal villages and left one million people homeless while reducing strength to millions more.
To the most sensible, Bangladesh suffered “its worst flood in a decade” with persistent and heavy monsoon rains that began in June, the country’s Flood Warning and Prediction Center director Arifuzzaman Bhuiyan told Agence France-Presse.
Faced with widespread unemployment, in addition to intermittent closure restrictions between March and early August, millions of citizens remain stranded with limited food and fitness care, while exposed to waterborne diseases in their overcrowded and water-saturated homes.
Desperate local situations have made public fitness measures, such as social estating and further handwashing, said Hasina Rahman, acting national director for Bangladesh at concern Worldwide’s foreign nonprofit humanitarian organization. , hand sanitizers and masks.
Before the pandemic, many rurally challenged people in Bangladesh historically faced seasonal flooding by locating jobs in nearby cities, such as clothing production or rickshawing, and returning to their farms as water levels dropped. longer periods of time.
This year, however, economic stagnation and the loss of work in the midst of Covid-19 have forced staff to return to their flood-prone villages, where there are even fewer economic opportunities, which has devastated remittances to and from Bangladesh’s urban centres.
Many more deficient people in rural Bangladesh fear sheltering in evacuation centres, and some even choose to live on their roofs to escape the waters, said Begum, who said he feared wasting the small land they owned.
However, his tenuous control over his only major asset is gradually receding. Over the years, emerging sea grades have led to the infiltration of new water through salt water and affected agricultural production. In addition, soil erosion has devastated their lands due to the weather. change, forcing them to increasingly favor new water for irrigation and livestock, as they travel further to find safe drinking water for their own homes.
By 2050, emerging sea grades will drive 18 million Bangladeshi from their homes and overwhelm nearly one-fifth of the country’s land mass, according to the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies, a non-governmental study institution.
Bangladesh is already experiencing waves of forced migration, with more than 400,000 more people coming en masse to Dhaka each year due to land loss and reduced economic opportunities, according to the World Bank, which cited the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics.
When Bangladesh reopened a lot of clothing factories in April, thousands of desperate people flocked to crowded commercial areas, adding the capital of Dhaka, which lately accounts for most of the coronavirus infections reported in the country.
“We see desperate staff willing to settle for very low wages in incredibly harmful conditions, without serious physical protection and protection, not to mention social esttachment measures or non-public protective equipment,” said Jon Hartough, Bangladesh’s national director of lucrative industry trade union associations. Company, Solidarity Center.
“It’s a vicious cycle of poverty, crisis and recovery,” Rahman said, adding that the cumulative effect of a surprise is then wreaking havoc on Bangladeshi residents, whose few lives have dried up.
Begum agreed, saying, “After a while, those other deficient People Array . . . have stopped worrying about what’s going to happen. They see very little difference between hunger and the death of the virus. “
For now, there is at least hope that the coronavirus pandemic will decrease if a vaccine develops effectively. Bangladesh has reported more than 337,500 cases of coronavirus and more than 4,700 deaths, according to knowledge compiled through Johns Hopkins University.
However, replacing the climate of war is much less secure.
“Many more times of crisis are coming,” Begum said, adding that more “frequent and intense” climate errors are occurring. The latest figures from the World Resources Institute show that China accounts for more than 26% of global emissions, us 14%, while the European Union accounts for 9. 6%. Bangladesh accounted for less than 0. 35% of global greenhouse fuel emissions in 2014, according to the country’s Ministry of Forests and Environment.
Local officials and humanitarian organizations suggested that the global network should more respect the 2015 Paris Agreement, which included a combined commitment of $100 billion through 2020 to invest in countries’ resistance to climate change.
“Unfortunately, very little of this money reaches other people on the front line,” Begum said. “Developed countries are not keeping their promises. They do not allocate climate funding to the poorest nations. “
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