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Bangladesh: Climate Refugees, Inequity, and the need for Empathy
Towards an Empathic World Consciousness: Considering the Case of Bangladesh
posted by Dorothy, April 24, 2010
Noted author and military analyst Gwynne Dyer is coming to Salt Spring Island to speak on Sunday, April 25. It will be a great privilege to have him here, and I want to bring together some material in this post to stimulate thinking about our future from a world security perspective.
Bangladesh is enclosed almost entirely by India
Gwynne Dyer is the author of Climate Wars, published by Random House Canada in 2008. You can read an interesting review of it from the Australian site Media/Culture Review by clicking here. There is a three-part podcast of Dyer reading from his book on Paul Kennedy’s Ideas at CBC Radio Canada, and a more recent interview with Climate TV on March 5 of this year.
As I see it, one of the most serious consequences dangerous climate change will cause is problem of “Climate Refugees.” Climate migration will eventually effect everyone, everywhere – even those living on our own island home. I’ve been looking for present-day examples of this monumental problem, and one of the worst cases is certainly the beleaguered nation of Bangladesh where:
- Migrants flooding Dhaka slums face ‘inhuman’ conditions
- 950 patients are coming to the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease and Research in Dhaka daily
- On March 30, with the temperature nearing the 30′s, air conditioners in Dhaka were banned between 6 and 11 pm
- Models suggest the low-lying nation of 156 million people could lose 17 percent of its land to rising seas, displacing 15 million people by 2050
- For more, read the January 24, 2009 WCCE post about living conditions in Bangladesh: A Tragic Story of Climate Woes in Bangladesh
Reading about life in Bangladesh these days makes it easy to succumb to “compassion fatigue,” as author Gwynne Dyer describes it in his book, Climate Wars.
And yet, an empathic approach is needed now more than ever.
Bangladesh ranks seventh in world population, with 162 million people, and those living in the southern third of the country are in danger of losing their land to storm surges and sea-level rise. Bangladeshi climate scientist Ariq Rahman calls it “climatic genocide:”
This is the ground zero of global warming…If you really want people in the West to understand the effect they are having here, it’s simple. From now on, we need to have a system where, for every 10,000 tonnes of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family to live with you. It is your responsibility. – Climate Wars, page 59
According to Wikipedia, the per capita Greenhouse Gas (CO2e) emissions for the US and Canada for the year 2005 were 23.5 and 22.6 metric tonnes, respectively.
For Bangladesh, it was 0.9, more that 20 times less.
So what does India do, faced with the reality of millions of hungry, thirsty and destitute climate refugees who will pour across its border seeking survival?
They build a fence.
But not just an ordinary fence. This fence, just completed, is a 4000 kilometer, 12 foot high, patrolled, triple barrier of barbed-wire. India’s stated reason for building it is to “keep out smugglers,” but it’s hard not to believe that that it’s true purpose is to fence the people of Bangladesh out. Their only escape route will be by sea, making their country a defacto “island state.”
There’s a good report at The Guardian, September 5, 2009: Fencing Off Bangladesh, by Delwar Hussain, with a powerful comment by Gideon Polya.
Watch a carefully-edited 43 second clip on the India-Bangladesh fence completed this March. Note the “kindly” soldier holding the smiling child:
Tripura Bangladesh border fence India
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Then watch this longer and more revealing 8 minute video about what this fence really means for Bangladeshis:
Embedding this video is denied, but you can watch it by clicking on this link or the title:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh7qM2OBv3o&NR=1
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On the subject of Empathy, I’ve just begun to read an important, timely and hopeful book by Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World of Crisis.
There’s an excellent article about this book at Huffington Post: “The Empathic Civilization”: Rethinking Human Nature in the Biosphere Area.
Rifkin’s book is also available as an eBook at Google Books.ca
What else should India do? Thake in zillions of Muslims into its territory? Why dont the western countries take them? Bangladesh might be producing very less CO2… but look at the number of children they produce.. is that sustainable?