Flooded future

The people of Bangladesh are no strangers to floods. The country's low-lying landscape, coupled with its position in the Ganges Delta means that it's always been susceptible, and that people have always had to adapt to cope with the effects. But the weather of recent years has come as a shock even to them, and is threatening security, livelihoods and even lives.

“20 or 30 years ago we could understand from the water temperature and the wind direction if the flood was going to come... Before it was mostly monsoon flooding in July or August, but now the rains are continuing into October,” says Laila Begum who’s been forced to move an incredible 25 times in her lifetime.

Laila’s story is not alone. She’s just one of the millions of Bangladeshis already being hit by changes in the world’s climate. For families like Laila’s, increasing temperature does not mean long and pleasant summers, but an awful combination of rising sea levels, unpredictable rainfall patterns and overflowing rivers caused by snow melting in the Himalayas.

“That causes problems as it’s when we should be planting our crops... There are more storms, more thunder and more lighting,” explains Laila.

With Oxfam’s support, some communities in Bangladesh have developed survival strategies. Emergency measures like raising homesteads, providing rescue boats, and flood early warning systems are helping people adapt to the reality of a changing climate, but this will need to be replicated on a massive scale for millions of people if changes in the climate become more severe.

Approximately 10 million people live in parts of Bangladesh that are less than a meter above sea level. If a rise in sea levels occurs at the top end of forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the UN’s scientific body that assesses the potential impacts and ways for coping with climate change – predict a fifth of Bangladesh could end up under water.

A rise of a few centimetres alone will submerge some areas – tragically, a rise of this level is already regarded as a certainty.

Despite what she’s been through, Laila remains strong. “If my land comes up [out of the water] I will go back to it. Maybe we will be able to move next year or the year after. If this [land] erodes we will move to another and begin again,” she says.

No one knows when the next major floods will hit Bangladesh, and we can’t know the damage they’ll cause or the amount of people who will be affected. However, we do know unless we take immediate action to stop climate change, the weather will continue to become more and more unpredictable. And for families like Laila’s this means an increasingly uncertain future.

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