Thursday 6 December 2007

Bangladesh and adaptation funding: Interview



Featured: Rezaul Chowdhury, teaching survival strategies on the southern coast of Bangladesh




With extreme weather already claiming thousands of lives and creating millions of climate refugees in Bangladesh, the UNFCCC’s proposal of an Adaptation Fund seems like a step in the right direction. Bangladeshi flood disaster rescuer, Rezaul Karim Chowdhury, gives me his take on what needs to be done.

Rezaul Chowdhury is director of COAST, a Bangladeshi organisation dedicated to survival strategies for the coastal poor. He originates from an island called Kutubdia, half of which is already underwater due to a mixture of extreme weather and river erosion.

Experts say if sea levels rise by up to a metre this century due to climate change, as many as 30 million Bangladeshis could be left homeless.

“People are already moving to Dhaka, from flooded villages in the South. This is the fate of Bangladesh’s climate refugees", says Chowdhury. He believes the majority of the refugees will flock to major cities like Dhaka and Chittagong, adding to the already huge shanty towns and creating mass unemployment.

“There is nowhere else for them to go. They’ll either die, or go to the cities”. Bangladesh is already a highly populated country, with an average density of 1100 people per square km. “Now half of Kutubdia island is gone”, he says “the remaining population density has doubled to 2700 people per square km”.

Chowdhury says adaptation for Bangladesh means training rural villagers in the Southern coastal regions of Bangladesh skills for urban jobs, such as driving and fixing machines (ironically, these jobs will contribute far more to climate change than the refugees’ previously rural existence.)

Aside from improving their employability in Bangladesh, he worries that refugees crossing the border to India to find work will be refused entry on the grounds that they are unskilled.

He praises the multinationals’ garment industry in Bangladesh for bringing foreign currency to the country and remains confident that the garment factories, which are based mostly in the cities, are safe from the risks of climate change. However, competition for factory jobs will be so fierce, that Chowdhury fears factory owners will start to lower wages.

According to Chowdhury, food prices are rising at 12% inflation. The government of Bangladesh was forced to buy in 1.6 million tonnes of food from the international market last year, due to crop damage from flooding. “The food is there, but people cannot afford to buy it”, he says.

The decision came during the UNFCCC Bali talks to launch an adaptation fund for developing countries facing treats from rising sea levels and extreme weather conditions.

The adaptation fund will be established using a 2% levy taken from CDM projects. Currently, the fund stands at a modest $36 million, generated this year, and the UNFCCC estimated in a press conference yesterday that by 2012 a total of $1.5 billion would be raised.

When asked to estimate the cost of adaptation in developing countries a UNFCCC spokesperson answered that a conservative estimate would be “$40 billion per year”.

Any money for adaptation would be a plus, from Chowdhury’s point of view, but what he worries most about are the strings attached to the fund.

The Global Environment Facility, an organisation with close links with the World Bank, was chosen during yesterday’s talks, to distribute the adaptation money.

Chowdhury fears the World Bank will land Bangladesh into more debt through adaptation financing schemes. “The World Bank’s a money lender, not a development institution” he says, “it’ll only promote big business, like GM crops, which will end up bankrupting small farmers… forced to pay the agro-companies for seeds” he says.

He blames the World Bank for adding to the flooding problem in the first place by advising Bangladesh to cut down its mangrove forests – a natural flood barrier – in order to expand the country's shrimp farming industry.

“This year’s monsoon brought with it 11 cyclones – compared to the two or three a year the country was receiving 5 years ago. We desperately need barriers to be built against flooding in the South”, says Chowdhury.

The death toll from the most recent Cyclone Sidr was 3,500, mostly a result of the subsequent floods. Bangladesh last month pleaded for $1 billion in aid to rebuild the country after the cyclone.

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