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Bangladesh's Kutubdia island may soon disappear underwater
Highlights
Hamida Begum has fled her home on Bangladesh’s Kutubdia island more times than she can remember while her neighbours have already given up the battle to prevent theirs being swallowed by the sea. “I am scared our house will be washed away as well some day and during the monsoon season we can\'t live here at all,” says the mother-of-four, standing outside the only one of a row of mud-brick shacks still intact.
Hamida Begum has fled her home on Bangladesh’s Kutubdia island more times than she can remember while her neighbours have already given up the battle to prevent theirs being swallowed by the sea. “I am scared our house will be washed away as well some day and during the monsoon season we can't live here at all,” says the mother-of-four, standing outside the only one of a row of mud-brick shacks still intact.
“But this is our land and besides, we don’t have money to go elsewhere.” Although around 1,00,000 people still reside on Kutubdia, few have any illusions they are living on borrowed time, with Coast — a Bangladeshi NGO — warning the whole island could disappear underwater within 50 years.
Tens of thousands have already left for good, mainly heading to the teeming capital Dhaka or a slum area of Cox’s Bazaar, a resort town some 80 kilometers away. In the build-up to the climate conference in Paris, there has been focus on low-lying island nations such as the Seychelles or those in the South Pacific which face obliteration if sea levels continue rising at current rates.
But their populations are dwarfed by the numbers living on the dozens of Bangladeshi islands and vulnerable coastal areas in what is one of the world’s flattest — and poorest — nations. “We have a long coastline, where about 39 million people live,” said Bangladesh’s environment secretary Kamal Uddin Ahmed. “If we have to shift those people to other areas it will be a big task for us because ours is a very densely populated country and we cannot really take all those people to other areas.” Bangladesh, along with the Philippines, Myanmar, and Haiti, is among the 10 nations most affected by the consequences of extreme weather events, according to a new climate survey released by advocacy group Germanwatch.
In 2009 the government set up a climate change trust fund, earmarking around six percent of the annual budget on adaptation measures. On Kutubdia, authorities have erected a network of flood defences and stilted cyclone shelters where residents retreat during monsoons which turn what is a slice of paradise in the Bay of Bengal into a near warzone. But they are fighting a losing battle, with Kutubdia's surface area having shrunk by around a quarter in the last three decades. Many of the concrete blocks erected to stem the tide have collapsed or become buried under sand as water laps further inland. “We have to move each time the waves come over and go and stay with a landlord who we have to pay rent to further inland. It's very painful for us,” said Begum.
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