Over 19 million children are vulnerable to climate change effects in Bangladesh

DHAKA: A United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report on April 8, 2019, said that lives and futures of more than 19 million children in Bangladesh is threatened with devastating floods, cyclones and other environmental disasters linked to climate change.

The report said that while Bangladesh have developed strategies and infrastructure for resilience, more resources and innovative programmes are needed to avoid the danger of climate change for the country’s youth.

Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director, who visited Bangladesh in early March 2019 said, “Climate change is deepening the environmental threat faced by families in Bangladesh’s poorest communities, leaving them unable to keep their children properly housed, fed, healthy and educated.”

The report points out that Bangladesh’s flat topography, dense population and weak infrastructure make it uniquely vulnerable to the climate change. Be it the flood and drought-prone lowlands in the northern part of the country or its storm-prone coastal areas, the threat of climate change is one of the major concerns.

Around 12 million children live in and around the powerful river systems which flow through Bangladesh and regularly burst their banks. A recent major flooding of the Brahmaputra River in 2017 inundated at least 480 community health clinics and damaged some 50,000 tube wells, essential for meeting communities’ safe water needs. Another 4.5 million children live in coastal areas regularly struck by powerful cyclones, including almost half a million ‘Rohingya’ refugee children living in fragile bamboo and plastic shelters.

The report says that climate change is a key factor pushing poor population of Bangladesh to shift their homes and communities and rebuild lives elsewhere. The report further mentions research showing that Bangladesh has 6 million climate migrants already, a number that could more than double by 2050.

The report calls on the international community and other partners to support the government in implementing a range of initiatives to protect the vulnerable people of Bangladesh from the effects of climate change. One of the examples is a technology being promoted by UNICEF and other partners which helps coastal communities to protect their vital supplies of drinking water against the intrusion of salt water from the sea. The system is known as Managed Aquifer Recharge which is working in around 75 communities and is ready to be taken to scale.