Unheard Voice

When we talk about climate change and think about it as some theoretical prospect of the future, it’s not. It’s here, it’s now, its facing these people in their daily lives.

Ed Miliband MP, Climate Secretary, to Sky News

As the world gears up for the UN’s climate change conference to be held in Copenhagen in December, many journalists, documentary makers, researchers and photographers have been dispatched to our part of the world to see for themselves what climate change is all about. Having had the good fortune or misfortune, depending on which way you’re looking at it, of working with some of these climate change enthusiasts, has made me realize, for the first time, how big Bangladesh’s climate change issue really is and how we, Bangladeshis, are almost completely oblivious to it! Also, how little we know about this.

Just a few hard facts first, the third or fourth assessment of the IPCC  report claims that by 2050, we will lose 17% of Bangladesh and 20 million will be displaced. All of this because of climate change– because the sealevels will rise, because we will see more cyclones and flood and because our people will have no where to go.

A couple of months ago, I got a request from a filming crew who wanted to film the “climate change in action” and wanted to visit the south-western coast of Bangladesh that was recently devastated by Cyclone Aila.

Then oh, they wanted me to find them a flood plain in Dhaka, which I was told, was a sinking city.

Seriously? Dhaka was sinking? And we were on “a” flood plain?

I called up everyone I knew who could be consulted on this matter and came up with zilch. No one could credibly establish if Dhaka was sinking– K bollo?; Hotei pare! to  Dhuur! Eishob tomader bideshi NGO der propaganda!

Nor could I find a flood plain in Dhaka.

A “flood plain” by definition is  ”a plain bordering a river and subject to flooding”,which for me, after working in various parts of Bangladesh, sums up the geographic description of the entire country. But what would be flood plain in Dhaka? Do the nearby rivers flood Dhaka? Or was it our incredibly badly-planned-and-made-worse-by-human-disdain-for- public-sanitation-sewerage system that would clog up during the high rains and flood the city? Then I read this and this.

So flooding in Dhaka happens for several reasons but predominantly, because of 1) rivers over flowing (owing to excessive rainfall or in some fallacies, Indian conspiracy theories) and 2) because of water-logging (which basically means that the water from rainfall will standstill because it has nowhere to flow/drain out as we’ve clogged up the sewer system and filled up the canals and lakes!) But apparently, since we’ve built some awesome embankments around the city (shameful that we have not done it in the rest of the country, but that’s subject for a different post), that there are now very few areas in Dhaka that will be flooded by overflown rivers.

The last river spillover flood we had in Dhaka was in 1998, when almost 70% of the country was under water. This is sadly the one information that every “climate change visitor” I have encountered has been well equipped with. It’s a mental picture of Bangladesh that they have in their heads, which they hope we will always be able to substantiate with a visual picture.

No matter how many times I would tell this crew that Dhaka is just technically  a flood plain, but is not as likely to be as badly flooded as the north or the south, (  that would be insulting the haors, the Ganga-Meghna-Brahmapurtra or just Meghna basin and the coastal belt), they insisted on being taken to at least one place in Dhaka were they could film flooding. This was in June 2009. I am told they eventually filmed in some parts of Mirpur and Ashulia. But other than shots of Dhaka’s most robust embankment, I don’t know what else they could have gotten from that.

They had apparently come to Dhaka with the idea that it would be like Tokyo (heh?)–by which they meant a city surrounded by frequently flooding rivers. The only caveat being that Tokyo has built this 6.4 km long flood tunnel to protect itself from current and future flooding,which looks nothing like our flood protection system.  And then I found this paper that actually talks about how similar the nature of flooding in Dhaka and Tokyo really are. I have a lot of gripes about this paper, but I still think it’s a worthy read. I for one, would never have thought that we had this in common with Tokyo! I always thought that it was our burgeoning population and our love for rice and fish! Anyway, back to the filming crew.

So I took the filming crew down to the site of the most underplayed disaster of our times–Cyclone Aila. I took them to Koyra upazilla in Khulna, in the heart of the Sundarbans. There is this place called Bedkashi, which to me is the most serene and peaceful place in the world, inhabited by the world’s most beautiful children. The Mondol , the Koyal, Das and the Bose families are people we have known for years. Their children studied in the school our organisation ran. We had given them relief items after Cyclone Aila and they had invited me over for some muri and adda even after their houses got washed away and they were forced to camp out on the embankment. Sadly, the film crew did not see these people the way I did.

For the filming crew of course, this was heaven!

We drove in at dawn, during gon– the new moon high/leap tide– when the rise in water levels is the highest. The crew were ecstatic– finally some real Bangladeshi flooding! Rising water, sunken houses,  collapsing embankment and even that classic shot of palm trees rising over a sunken house with water, water, everywhere– could they ask for more? Then of course there were the people. The moderately well-off family who had overnight become destitute and homeless, the mother who had barely managed to save her two children from a fierce tidal surge and the father who has not had work for months.  With every tale of human fall and loosing dignity (a middle-class family sleeping under the open sky, feeding children, who were used to eating koral and faissha, only chira and muri,), of struggle and of survival the ecstacy of the crew increased, but for the wrong reasons. When Modhumita boudi, told us how she’d been unable to sleep ever since they lost their houses and gher to Aila, the film crew could barely contain their glee– that’s great stuff for television! I hope it doesn’t get lost in translation. Half the time, the crew didn’t even bother asking them their names– what’s the point, we’ll never remember it! the chirpy cameraman had quipped.  It was then I asked them, if they cared so little, why take all this trouble to tell our story? I was not refering to the filming crew in particular, but the “West”’s general interest in Bangladesh and climate change. I got the very flippant Oh! Don’t you know? You guys are high on the list of highest risk countries. You guys are slowly sinking.

So it wasn’t just Dhaka. It is in fact all of Bangladesh. The whole world sees it but we don’t. Douglas Alexander and Ed Miliband, two very high profile UK ministers come to Bangladesh only to talk about this issue. Their PM, Gordon Brown pledges $100 billion yearly to all countries like us to adapt to climate change.

But what are we doing about it ourselves? How are we adapting to climate change? All adaptation measures (mostly still in pilot stages)are being coordinated by foreign NGOs and funded by the “West”, which makes sense because they’re the ones who’re actually partially, if not entirely, responsible for this phenomenon. But what is the Bangladeshi contribution? Did we really need foreign donors to tell us that we should really raise ducks as opposed to chickens, because, guess what, ducks don’t sink?

Are we even talking about it, outside of the few seminars and talkshows? Why is it always foreign media outlets who run one-hour specials along the lines of “Bangladesh–the frontrunners of climate change”  etc.

As the Copenhagen talk approaches and my inbox, like the inbox of every other person who’re in touch with the climate change enthusiasts around the world, spills over with requests to visit the various high-risk sites around my country, I can’t help but wonder, how come they care about this more than we do? How come they know more about it than us? How come they realise the enormity of our problem as we blissfully, ignorantly sink–cm by cm?

Are we not scared yet?