MODHUMITA, a housewife and mother of two, hasn’t had a full night’s sleep since May not since her house and the small shrimp hatchery her family owned got washed away by Cyclone Aila and her two small children almost died.
The last time I was down in her village Shakbaria: a small community of about a 40-50 mainly Hindu families on the south-western coastal belt of Khulna her family of seven was still living in a makeshift house made of straw, fronds and plastic sheeting provided by Save the Children UK.
This was almost four months after the Cyclone had hit the house that got washed away. That was an NGO-prescribed “climate-resilient” variety of the kind that had been built to stand tall even against the onslaught of violent, tropical storms. It got washed away by the fierce tidal surge of unprecedented velocity. The early warning systems in place had only predicted the storm, not the ferocity of the tidal surge. The collateral damage was not caused by the storm, but by the mighty tidal surge that it had propelled. This shows once again that we need to scale up our disaster risk reduction efforts and hone our early warning systems.
Read more…
Fariha, October 15th 2009 |
Posted in Climate Change, Crisis Management
I regularly visit the coastal regions of Bangladesh for work. Whenever I meet a family, the first personal question I am asked is, Apnar bari kothai? (Where is your home?) “Dhaka”, is my standard response. This is usually met by a curious look, because very few people are really from Dhaka, a city of migrants, many of whom have lived there for generations but who have never owned it. For most, it is a city to be at, not a place to be from.
So I have to explain, “I live in Dhaka now, but our family is really from Habiganj, Sylhet.”
Inevitably, I get an enthusiastic, “Oh! So do you visit Sylhet? How is your village?”
“I don’t know. We lost everything to the river.”
This earns me instant empathy. They take me in as one of them – a migrant soul detached from her roots, a survivor of our changing homeland. Then they want to tell me more about themselves because they feel a kind of kinship. But I am not sure how similar our migrant experiences really are. Our home in Habiganj was washed away before I was even born. I was born uprooted. Most of the people I meet at the coast have been uprooted in the recent past. Some are being uprooted in the very present. Read more…
Fariha, October 12th 2009 |
Posted in Climate Change
There are 192 countries in the United Nations. Many of their leaders attend the General Assemby every September. This year has been noted for the first UNGA speech by President Obama. The Bangladeshi Prime Minister also gave a speech. As has been noted, Bangladeshi media chose to focus on the speech being in Bangla, even though that’s routine for the country’s heads of government. This post focuses on what she actually said.
About 20 para, of which only about half that the world is interested in, of which only one that actually made a strong argument. Madam Prime Minister, next time do better.
(More at Mukti)
jyoti, October 7th 2009 |
Posted in Climate Change, Foreign Matters
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.
Read more…
Fariha, September 27th 2009 |
Tags: Bangladesh, Climate Change, Copenhagen
Posted in Climate Change, Uncategorized
Chobi Mela V, the International Festival of Photography organised by Drik Photo Agency, will take place from 29 January – 20 February 2009.
Visit chobimela.org.
Munem Wasif is doing well.
Aged just 26 he’s already staged an exhibition at Visa Pour l’Image (having won the City of Perpignan Young Reporter’s Award), reached the final of the prestigious Prix Pictet (alongside world-famous photographers such as Edward Burtynsky) and joined the prestigious Vu agency (in April last year). But what makes his achievements all the more impressive is that Wasif from Bangladesh, a Third World country far from photojournalism’s Western epicentre.
‘It’s the first time I’ve been to Visa Pour l’Image and I’m the first Bangladeshi photographer to exhibit here,’ he tells BJP. ‘The world is so orientated towards Western media and Western news, because of the wealth and power of those countries. Western people go to other parts of the world and shoot and tell their own stories. But it’s very important to give some space to photographers documenting their own countries because they know the place, and the struggle, better. It’s more indigenous, and more authentic.
‘Things are getting blocked because they’re always seen from one perspective. How much coverage have you seen of Iraq and Afghanistan, always by a Western photographer? How many stories emerge taken from within those societies? It’s not about photography, it’s about not looking at people as other peoples. It’s about sharing your own story, like a grandmother telling a story to her granddaughter. It’s more personal, more intimate, and for me it’s more true.’
Wasif showed images from three projects at Visa – the effects of climate change in rural Bangladesh, the oppressed Rohingya Muslims of Bangladesh and Burma, and traditional life and customs in Puran (‘old’) Dhaka.
More
Asif, February 5th 2009 |
Posted in Climate Change
The original piece was published in Forum.
A few yards from the Royal Albert Hall, British Minister Douglas Alexander was grandly offering Bangladesh $25 million a year, over five years, to protect itself against climate change.
Adviser Mirza, a World Bank alumni, surrounded by World Bank officials at the DFID conference after controversially declaring the management of the fund ‘may be’ given to World Bank/photo: Drishtipat
On the same day, a jury in Kent in England was deliberating over six environmental campaigners who had tried to paint the name of the UK prime minister onto part of a massive coal plant. The jury decided that direct action causing minor damage was justified to prevent the greater damage caused by climate change. The six were acquitted.
Read more…
Farid Bakht, October 1st 2008 |
Posted in Climate Change
Climate change has been identified as the most significant threat to the ability of the planet to sustain life. It is damaging to the world’s ecosystem and is set to cause a global environmental disaster. The geographical location of Bangladesh, locked between the Himalayas in the north and the Bay of Bengal in the south, makes the country the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The rapid melting of the Himalayan glaciers has added momentum to the currents of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, causing extensive flooding. Global warming coupled with rising sea levels in the Bay of Bengal have been responsible for the increased intensity of cyclones, monsoon rain and land erosion in recent years.
As part of it annual project on raising awareness on climate change impact on Bangladesh and South Asia, Drishtipat London is launching a blog/portal site today that is going to exclusively focus on the impact of climate change in South Asia, specially Bangladesh. The threat of 1/3 of Bangladesh getting wiped away and creating 125 million climate refugees are very real. As expatriate Bangladeshis, it is our collective responsibility, to highlight the injustice of the whole issue where Bangladesh will pay the price of Western excesses that is destroying our planet.
Visit the website http://isanybodylistening.info today and spread the word to others.
admin, April 1st 2008 |
Posted in Climate Change
Zafar Sobhan
He who saves one life, saves the world entire.
–Talmud
A traveler was walking along a beach when he saw a woman scooping up starfish off the sand and tossing them into the waves. Curious, he asked her what she was doing. The woman replied: “When the tide goes out, it leaves these starfish stranded on the beach. They will dry up and die before the tide comes back in, so I am throwing them back into the sea where they can live.”
The traveler then asked her: “But this beach is miles long and there are hundreds of stranded starfish, many will die before you reach them — do you really think throwing back a few starfish is really going to make a difference?”
The woman picked up a starfish and looked at it, then she threw it into the waves and said: “It makes a difference to this one.”
–Popular fable
It’s a never-ending story: floods, cyclones, death, destruction. Inside the country, the events had a deadening familiarity. The days of foreboding as, literally, the storm clouds gathered The heightening anxiety with the periodic escalation of the official danger level. The collective holding of our breath and sense of impending doom as the storm hit. And the desperate rush for shelter and safety before, during, and after, that sadly left far too many behind and unprovided for.
Read more…
logicat, November 26th 2007 |
Posted in Bangladesh, Climate Change, Natural Disaster
Suddenly the water turns black and all the dead fishes, alligators and sharks start floating at the rivers adjacent to the Bay of Bengal in the Sundarbans (The last remaining unadulterated forest in Bangladesh). A commercial liner is reported to be in trouble nearby. Blogger AsifY posts a blog on this issue. Not a single reader takes part in the discussion, while hundreds of comments flood the posts on politics, the leaders and their sons. And nobody in Dhaka chattering class makes a single sound about it.
All the sewer wastes of 7 million Dhakaites are collected, processed in 16 large lagoons near Dhaka. Many years ago, some evil traders start raising fish in those sewer collecting depots. These fish are sold in Dhaka markets for years. Government decides to stop it. They poison the fishes and try to collect the dead fishes for burning. Suddenly thousands of local people storm the area, battle with the police, loot the fishes, and run back with the poisoned dead fishes grown in sewer lagoon.
Probably the cry of hunger was a little too intense.
While all these happen, the beastly cry at Dhaka zoo gets louder for a couple of days. As a result of some government bureaucratic entanglement, administrative inefficiency and extreme indifference to the core duty of the job, the animals of Dhaka zoo starve for 3 days. Apparently the budget to buy meat etc for the animal needed some signature at the secretariat. The agriculture advisor, upon hearing the story from media men, call in the zoo officials, some emergency fund is managed and several cows are collected from nearby Savar Dairy farm to feed the zoo animals. These animals would have fed themselves if they were allowed to live in their natural habitat. Now as their natural habitat has been destroyed and they are held captive, it is the responsibility of the captors to feed these animals.
And all these happen when this glowing Dhaka breaks into the list of top ten countries in high tech mobile phone sells.
rumi, July 4th 2007 |
Posted in Bangladesh, Climate Change, Crisis Management, Environment, civil society
An incredible new piece on climate change linking it directly to river erosions in Bangladesh. Drishtipat London is going to work on the issue of climate change this year to raise awareness on west’s responsibility on this and the danger it brings towards the future of Bangladesh. Also another goal is connect people working outside Bangladesh on this issue with the folks in Bangladesh who are working at the grass root level. If you are interested to volunteer to this cause, please write to info AT london DOT drishtipat dot org
The once lush island of Aralia is disappearing under rising waters as flooding becomes more frequent, temperatures increase and disease kills four people a month
It is hard to gauge the exact extent of the local devastation caused by climate change because severe flooding and catastrophic river erosion are part of every day life in rural Bangladesh. But the island of Aralia, in the Haor flood plain of north-east Bangladesh has, in the past 50 years, diminished to a fifth of its size, according to its older residents Ask anyone over 40 about the island of their childhoods and they describe fertile fields, green trees and animals, an island of plenty, where children grew up healthy and went to school. Today, Shamola’s misfortunes are becoming the norm as flooding and river erosion become ever more common. Non-government agencies working with Bangladesh’s poor, as well as scientists throughout the world, are convinced that climate change is to blame for the dramatic increase in this flooding.
With a population of 150 million, Bangladesh is the world’s most densely populated country. A series of straddling deltas of some of the world’s biggest rivers, Bangladesh is at risk not only from rising sea levels, but the increased flow of water caused by more rain and glacial melt from the Himalayas. At this rate of flooding and erosion, 20 per cent of Bangladesh could be under water by 2100. All this despite the average Bangladeshi using just one tenth of the carbon emissions of any European, and one 25th of the average citizen of the United States.
Read more…
admin, April 19th 2007 |
Posted in Climate Change, Environment, Foreign Media
