Bangladesh needs adaptation funds now: interview

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.

But Bangladeshi flood disaster rescuer Rezaul Karim Chowdhury sees potential pitfalls as well as benefits in the scheme.

Rezaul Chowdhury is director of COAST, an organisation dedicated to survival strategies for Bangladesh’s coastal poor. He comes 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.

Stark choice

“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 1,100 people per square km. “Now half of Kutubdia island is gone,” he says “the remaining population density has doubled to 2,700 people per square km.”

Chowdhury says adaptation for Bangladesh means training rural villagers in the southern coastal regions in 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.

Rising costs, fight for jobs

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.

Food price inflation is running at 12%, he says. Bangladesh was forced to buy in 1.6 million tonnes of food from the international market last year owing to crop damage from flooding. “The food is there but people cannot afford to buy it,” he says.

At the UNFCCC Bali talks it was decided to launch an adaptation fund for developing countries facing threats from rising sea levels and extreme weather conditions.

The 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.

However, the estimated cost of adaptation in developing countries would be at least “$40 billion per year”, according to a UNFCCC spokesperson.

Debt fears

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

The Global Environment Facility, an organisation with close links to 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 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 its shrimp farming industry.

Cyclone explosion

“This year’s monsoon brought with it 11 cyclones – compared to the two or three a year the country was receiving five 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 as a result of the subsequent floods. Bangladesh last month pleaded for $1 billion in aid to rebuild the country after the cyclone.