Building on a high awareness of climate change

This relatively high awareness now needs to be translated into knowledge of the solutions to the problem. It requires further research, capacity building, planning and piloting activities, initially for a few years, and then scaling up of those practices that show success over the next time period.

I will identify three aspects of the problem and discuss possible solutions to them. These are the issues of migration, urbanisation and education.

Migration is a highly emotive subject, with more sound than light at the moment. Migration of people around the world has been going on for millennia; it is nothing new. In Bangladesh also, it is nothing new, as people have been moving from rural to urban areas (for example, Dhaka is the fastest growing mega-city in the world) as well as abroad to both neighbouring and more distant countries.

In recent times, the spectre of millions of additional “climate change migrants” has been increasingly raised (not least by the military establishments in many countries). This framing looks at migration due to climate change as a threat.

There is, however, another framing that is being put forward by some – namely, looking at “planned” or “assisted” migration as a solution and not a problem.

Since we now know there will be some places on the planet that will no longer be inhabitable in the next few decades (such as low-lying coastal areas in Bangladesh), we need to think and plan the re-location of the people currently living in those places (more precisely, the children of the people living there now and over the next ten to twenty years).

Regarding urbanisation, the world as a whole has already crossed the threshold into a predominantly urban, rather than rural, world, and this is also happening in Bangladesh at a very fast pace.

Bangladesh’s urbanisation so far has been highly Dhaka-centric, with most rural-to-urban migrants choosing to come to Dhaka.

In many ways, over the next 10, 20 and 30 years – which is the timescale in which human-induced climate change affects will manifest themselves  one could boil down the essence of Bangladesh’s climate-change strategy as one of combining planned migration from rural areas to urban areas other than Dhaka. This means diverting investment from Dhaka to other urban centres to create jobs and provide education and other infrastructure to attract rural people to go there instead of coming to Dhaka.

The third element of a possible strategy over such a timescale is education. The strategy will be implemented by the next generation of citizens. Hence, the role of the current generation of adults is to educate and empower the next generation to be able to find jobs in towns and cities rather than becoming farmers like their parents.

In other words, over the next couple of decades we need to transform our citizens from liabilities (mouths to feed) to a productive labour force (hands to work), as is already happening now, and then transform them to problem-solvers (educated minds). In the context of tackling climate change, our future educated citizens will not only help solve Bangladesh’s problems but also the rest of the world’s.

 

Saleemul Huq is director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University, Bangladesh.