“How can we go back to our town? There is nothing left there.” Noyom Tara takes a breath and looks out onto the street through the half-open door of her home, a single room made of corrugated iron in a suburb of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where she lives with her husband and son. “There’s a river running through where our house used to be. We have lost everything. Now there is only water and more water,” she says in a broken voice, covering her face with her hands.
Noyom is a fragile-looking 40-year-old, although she seems much older. She has lost everything and has had to start from scratch four times over. Like her husband and son, she was born in the village of Morol Kamdi, a rural area in the south of the country, in a house that “had everything. We harvested our own rice and had cows and ducks. The whole family lived together, including my in-laws. Life was happy.” However, about ten years ago this bucolic scene started to turn to water. The river next to her house had been gradually eroding the shore, swallowing the land in its path.
The day when the water finally reached their door, Noyom and her family decided to dismantle the house and move a few metres inland, but it didn’t do them much good. The river, patiently but inevitably, continued to swallow everything in its path in each flood. After just over a year, there wasn’t a single piece of land in the entire village on which to stand.
“All the neighbours in the area were affected by the erosion. We couldn’t think what to do, where to go. We were terrified.” Resigned, they dismantled the house a second time and moved to another area, further north, where they believed they would be safe from the water. They were wrong. For the third time, the river once again claimed everything. Desperate and without the strength to go through the same thing again they sold the roof and the windows - the only things they had left of value - and they migrated again, but this time to Dhaka.
Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with 161 million inhabitants in 2018 (according to the World Bank). It is also one of the most vulnerable and worst impacted by climate change, ranking seventh in the table of ‘Countries most affected in the period 1999-2018’ on the Global Climate Risk Index 2020. Almost a third of its total population lives on the coast and a large part of the country is practically at sea level. In the Sundarbans region – in the Bay of Bengal, in the south of the country – a combination of a rapidly rising sea level (1.5 times faster than the global average) and river erosion is submerging entire villages and causing the forced displacement of millions of people who have helplessly watched their homes sink underwater. Like so many things in Bangladesh, the figures are shocking: over the last decade almost 700,000 people a year lost their homes, while around 10 to 13 million people will be forced to move before 2050.
The ecological impact of the activity of the inhabitants of the Sundarbans is minimal yet they are all acutely aware of the consequences of climate change: it is a reality that shows itself with every high tide. “We only had time to take our little daughter and run before the house sank,” says Shaheen. Behind her, where her house (and those of eight other families) once was, three boats are moored. It is only a week since the landslide (at the time of visiting this family and taking the photo) and the cracks in the earth are still visible. “We have nowhere to go. We have no money left. I don’t know what will happen to us, we have lost everything.”
Like Noyom and her family, the majority of those affected by climate change will end up seeking refuge in Dhaka. There is still no consensus on whether or not they can be called climate refugees, but the reality is that every year more than 300,000 people arrive in the city fleeing some kind of environmental disaster.
When they arrive, they will have lost the land that has been in their families for generations and generations, their livestock and their way of life. But their troubles don’t end here, they will face new hardship. Dhaka is a city on the verge of collapse and the third least liveable on the planet, after Damascus in Syria and Lagos in Nigeria. With a population of over 20 million people (Dhaka has a bigger population than the next three largest cities in the country) it just doesn’t have the capacity to accommodate anyone else. Without the support of the government, most of these climate refugees end up living in slums and working in semi-slavery in one of the thousands of factories scattered throughout the city.
It is what has happened to Jahangir. It was difficult to find him because he works from dawn till dusk every day of the year, either in the brick factory or pushing his rickshaw. His mother, an 83-year-old woman, works cleaning dishes in a luxury hotel. His home, and that of the other 10,000 residents of the village, disappeared underwater in 2017. When he was left without land, he married off his first daughter for about 300,000 takas (just over €3,000, about US$3,290). Shortly after, he says, he saw the need to marry off the other. It is not an isolated case. A report by the NGO Human Rights Watch links the high rates of child marriage in Bangladesh (the fourth highest in the world) with the consequences of climate change (especially river erosion). Many of the affected families feel the need to marry their daughters because they cannot support them: “Every day I think about killing myself,” says Jahangir between constant puffs on a cigarette. “But it is a serious sin.”