I have posted before about one of the fastest growing “megacities” in the world, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Nearly 500,000 migrants flow into the capital city each year, many motivated by environmental pressures. Erik German and Solana Pyne of GlobalPost examine the future of Dhaka in a five-part multimedia special report. This series is currently shown on PBS Newshour, with the first part aired on September 8, 2010.

The five parts of the series are:

• Part One: Dhaka the fastest growing megacity in the world
• Part Two: The dreams of Dhaka’s garment girls
• Part Three: Disasters drive mass migration to Dhaka
• Part Four: Looking on the bright side of Earth’s growing slums
• Part Five: Who can solve a problem like Dhaka?

The video posted above is part three, as its focus is on both slow onset and sudden distasters resulting in individuals and families migrating to the urban sprawl of Dhaka in search of a better life. Click here to be taken to the main page of GlobalPost series where you can access the videos and news report for all five parts.

Three of the episodes center around the issue of human mobility as a result of climate change at some depth, often following the lives of those who chose to abandon their farming livelihoods and move to nearby mega cities in search of a better life.

I have embedded the first episode “Bursting at the Seams”, which examines Lagos – one of the fastest growing cities in the world. The other two are “Water, water, everywhere…” which explores the capital city of Dhaka in Bangladesh, and “Feed the World” which follows migrants from their drought stricken villages to the city of Dakar in Senegal. Each episode is about 45 minutes long. Click here to check out the other episodes in the series.

Source: BBC World News/rockhopper.tv

Two years later, they are still here. Ms. Noor, 25, and Mr. Hawladar, 35, work long hours at low-paying jobs – she at a garment factory and he at a roadside tea stall. They are unable to save money after paying for food and rent on their dark shanty in Korail, one of the largest slums in Dhaka. And in their village, more people are leaving because of river erosion and dwindling job opportunities.

“We’re trapped,” Ms. Noor said.

Natural calamities have plagued humanity for generations. But with the prospect of worsening climate conditions over the next few decades, experts on migration say tens of millions more people in the developing world could be on the move because of disasters.

Rather than seeking a new life elsewhere in a mass international “climate migration,” as some analysts had once predicted, many of these migrants are now expected to move to nearby megacities in their own countries.

“Environmental refugees have lost everything,” said Rabab Fatima, the South Asia representative of the International Organization for Migration. “They don’t have the money to make a big move. They move to the next village, the next town and eventually to a city.”

Such rapid and unplanned urbanization is expected to put even further strains on scarce water, energy and food resources, said Koko Warner, who works in environmental migration at the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security in Bonn.

In Bangladesh, a largely flat, riverine nation where more than 140 million people live in one of the most densely populated countries in the world, past generations often moved to cities seasonally. They worked to send money home to their villages and usually returned there during planting season.

But in recent years, the moves are more likely to be permanent. More intense storms and floods, salinization damage to crops caused by the encroaching sea and especially worsening river erosion have left many people rootless, Ms. Fatima said.

Dhaka, the capital, is often the only real option in this region. It is the fastest-growing megacity in the world, according to the World Bank. At least 12 million people live in Dhaka, and there are more than 400,000 newcomers each year. The World Bank predicts that the population could grow dramatically by 2020.

Like the rest of Bangladesh, Dhaka is also extremely vulnerable to climate change: It is just a few meters above sea level and is regularly hit by cyclones and floods. The environmental group WWF recently rated it among the megacities most vulnerable to the effects of global warming, after Jakarta and Manila.

As many as half of the people in Dhaka live in shantytowns and slums, says Atiq Rahman, a climate change researcher and executive director of the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies. Of those, Mr. Rahman and Ms. Fatima estimate that three million people have been displaced by environmental degradation or disasters.

The most destitute people live in clusters of improvised tents made of plastic sheets and discarded bamboo and often erected on private land near markets, railroad tracks and the city’s rivers.

Most poor, working-class families end up in minicities like Korail, where Ms. Noor, the migrant from southern Bangladesh, lives with her husband and two daughters. Ms. Noor’s third child, a son, lives with his grandmother in the family’s village.

Korail sits on public land and is shared by at least 40,000 people crowded into cramped, cockroach-infested rental shanties made of mud, bamboo and corrugated tin.

Barefoot children play with broken marbles on narrow mud lanes filled with garbage and streams of raw sewage. A few enterprising residents have opened vegetable stands, tailor shops, carpentry mills and teahouses in tiny shacks.

Aid groups run primary schools in Korail and other slums, but many children work or stay home to mind younger siblings while their parents work.

Child trafficking and arson are serious problems, experts here say. Ms. Noor says she worries she will come home one day and find her young daughters kidnapped, or worse.

“Every day I hear about a fire or about someone’s child missing,” Ms. Noor said.

Ms. Noor’s next-door neighbor, Aklima Akhter, 22, also lost her home and her family’s small market in her southern Bangladesh village to flooding caused by Cyclone Sidr.

Another neighbor, Mukhles Rahman, 38, and his brother Mohammad Farid Uddin, 56, left their village of Chawlakathi in the division of Barisal eight years ago because of river erosion.

Their family once grew rice, jute, sugar cane, mustard seed and radishes on four hectares, or 10 acres. Over a couple of decades, the Sandhya River washed away the farmland and the family home.

“My father could cross the river just by jumping across,” said Mr. Uddin, who finished high school and ran a small school in his village. “Even when I was a youngster in the 1960s, we could swim across. Now it’s so big.”

These days, the two brothers live in a tiny shanty with Mukhles Rahman’s wife and young son.

“We are trying to find another place to go, because all the land back home is dissolving,” said Mukhles Rahman, who works as a security guard at a garment factory. “But there aren’t jobs in other cities or in villages.”

For migrants displaced because of the environment, Bangladesh hopes to begin helping them find opportunities in cities other than Dhaka, said Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi scientist who is a senior fellow in the climate change group of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.

Bangladesh and other countries hit hard by climate change are supposed to receive money from a $100 billion annual green climate fund approved by the negotiators at the Copenhagen summit meeting in December. Smaller amounts of aid have been pledged for the next few years. The larger amounts of environmental aid are not expected to begin flowing until 2020.

Later this year, Mr. Huq will open and lead the International Center for Climate Change and Development, an institute based just outside of Dhaka and aimed at helping vulnerable countries come up with practical ways to adapt to climate change.

“We are going to have low-lying areas in Bangladesh that are not going to be inhabitable anymore, so those people will have to go somewhere,” Mr. Huq said. While Dhaka has managed to absorb millions of migrants, he said that this “can’t go on forever. Dhaka can’t take it, and neither can the people.”

Rashida Akhter, a local manager for BRAC, a nongovernmental organization that operates across Bangladesh as well as in several other poor countries, says that more than 90 percent of the Korail slum’s residents never leave because they cannot save enough money to move.

Ms. Noor and Mr. Hawladar say they cannot imagine growing old in a dank, depressing place like Korail. They still dream about returning to their home village of Nandikathi, a poor, waterlogged hamlet of about 3,000 people.

“It’s our home, not Dhaka” Mr. Hawladar said.

Their 6-year-old son is in Nandikathi with his grandmother. They have not seen him for a year. If they lived there, their daughters, ages 8 and 3, would be able to go to school, instead of being stuck alone all day in a tiny rented shack.

Ms. Noor, who remembers a modest but more comfortable life in Nandikathi, talks about rebuilding the family’s shattered hut and reviving her drowned backyard garden of greens and gourds.

Mr. Hawladar says he wants to open another market there and add a tea house. He was badly injured in a road accident a few years ago and cannot do physical labor, so he spends 15-hour days in a wooden roadside stall in an affluent Dhaka neighborhood, brewing tea for businessmen. He makes 150 taka, or $2, a day. Ms. Noor makes about $1 a day at the garment factory.

They count their earnings at night, in silence, on the wooden plank that serves as the family bed. They never have enough money.

Even if they could save enough money to rebuild their home, the prospects are bleak in Nandikathi. The nearby Dhanshiri River has become more unruly, eroding land and livelihoods.

Ms. Noor says she sometimes stays up until the morning, worrying that the next big flood will just wash the village away.

“Where will people live then?” she asked.

Joanna Kakissis reported with the help of a grant from the International Reporting Project. Sumon Kaiser of bdnews24.com contributed reporting.

Source: New York Times

Ciara Sutton is a multimedia broadcast journalist who worked on climate change migration issues in Kenya earlier this year as part of a project for her MA in International Journalism. The project is supported by interviews with international climate change professionals and representatives on the ground from the Red Cross. She authors her own blog “Climate Change and Human Migration in Kenya” where she documented her journey, examines the lives of migrants, and posts related stories.

Below is a recent video from her website which highlights the issue of climate-induced rural to urban migration in Kenya:

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Source: Climate Change and Human Migration in Kenya

Related Links:
» Devastating East Africa Droughts Caused by Volatile Climate – VOA News – (Sep, 2009)
» A new (under) class of travellers – The Economist (Jun, 2009)
» Climate Change and Migration in Nairobi – UNHABITAT & Columbia University (Jun, 2009)

“The situation has now got really severe; we are talking about desert, rather than farming land,” said Abdel Qader Abu Awad, MENA (Middle East and North Africa) disaster management coordinator for the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). “People cannot live in this environment any more and their final coping mechanism is migration.”

Syria‘s drought is now in its second year, affecting farming regions in the north and east of the country, especially the northeastern governorate of Hassakeh. Wheat production is just 55 percent of its usual output and barley is seriously affected, according to the UN’s drought response plan, drawn up following two recent multi-agency missions.

Blamed on a combination of climate change, man-made desertification and lack of irrigation, up to 60 percent of Syria‘s land and 1.3 million people (of a population of 22 million) are affected, according to the UN. Just over 800,000 people have lost their entire livelihood, according to the UN and IFRC.

No-one knows exactly how many people have migrated across the country because of the drought. The Syrian Ministry for Agriculture and Agrarian Reform’s estimate in July was 40,000 to 60,000 families, with 35,000 from Hassakeh alone. But with people moving all the time, the figure is likely to be an underestimate.

The UN’s drought response plan found there had been a “dramatic increase in the already substantial migration out of the affected areas”. Migrants head for the cities of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs, according to the report.

“It is very difficult to monitor the scale of migration as it is constantly happening,” said Awad. “When NGOs head to a settlement, there is no guarantee anyone will still be there.”

“Nothing left for us there”

In July, Hassan Hami Hami and his family moved to a suburb of Damascus after he lost his livelihood as a wheat farmer in Qamishle on the northeast border with Turkey, around 650 km from Damascus.

“There is nothing left for us there,” he said. “Farming stopped and I sold plastic for a while, but it was not enough. We had to borrow so much money from people just to survive.”

He said moving was a last resort. “It is not our home but with my son and daughter-in-law working we can just about manage.”

Hassan and his wife, his son and daughter-in-law and their four children now share a small, bare apartment. Between them his son and daughter-in-law earn SYP 9,000 [US$196] a month by working shifts in a local factory. Downstairs and in next-door buildings live other families who have moved because of the drought.

Knock-on effects

The migration is causing knock-on social problems for these families as they have left behind the tight-knit communities they belonged to. Crime rates are on the rise in areas where drought migrants have settled, because of poverty, say locals.

A UN joint mission report in July said more and more children were being sent to work rather than going to school.

“The drought is causing a high drop-out rate,” Sherazade Boualia, the resident representative of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Syria, said. “It is vital that children do not miss out on education. We are trying to give support to people so their children do not need to leave school in order to work. For those who move, we are trying to make sure they enrol in new schools.”

Families left in the area who cannot afford, or do not want, to move are suffering. The UN’s drought response plan lists problems including the drying up of drinking water; and water from unclean sources is threatening to cause disease. Prices are rising as food becomes scarce; people are surviving on bread and sugared tea, said the UN.

Aid designed to stall migration

In August, IFRC gave US$300,340 from its emergency fund to the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) to distribute food to the most vulnerable people. The organizations will launch a joint appeal to fund water purification equipment in schools and promote hygiene. The government and UN agencies have distributed food packages and seeds in the past.

Agencies hope the emergency measure can stall further migration. “When you get to the point where you decide to give up and move, things have gone very far,” said Awad. “But many families do not want to leave their homeland and those who have, want to return.”

Aid agencies say a sustainable long-term plan for the affected areas is needed. “We need to do studies to identify a disaster risk reduction strategy on how to overcome climate change and have better farming practices,” said Awad.

“These include planting new trees, good irrigation and legislation to prevent overuse of the land,” he said. “No one will go back if they don’t have a livelihood to go back to.”

Source: IRIN

Related Links:
» Somalia: Pastoralists Leave Drought-Hit Villages – IRIN (Jun 23, 2009)
» 160 Syrian Villages Deserted ‘Due to Climate Change – AFP (Jun 2, 2009)

“More than 20 percent of the nomads have moved to the urban centres, [and are] living with their families in villages near towns,” Mursal Askar Mire, the mayor of Eil-Afweyn District in Sanag Region, told IRIN.

The displaced, who have received aid from the Danish Refugee Council (DRC), were mainly in the Sool and Sanag regions, which are claimed by both Somaliland and neighbouring Puntland.

Roda Ahmed Yasin, a DRC sanitation officer, said the agency – through the Somaliland Red Crescent – had distributed non-food items to 1,800 families in Sanag, mostly in 12 centres in Erigavo District and 12 others in Eil-Afweyn District.

The aid recipients, he said, included families that had lost their livestock to the drought, and Ethiopian refugees heading to Bosasso en-route to countries in the Arabian Peninsula.

Mire, the Eil-Afweyn mayor, said the prolonged drought in Sool and Sanag regions had created a food and livelihood crisis.

“Non-food aid is welcome, but one of the main problems facing the people is lack of food; we would be happy to get food aid for those affected by drought,” he said.

Severe drought has hit Sool and Sanag regions in the past few months following the failure of the `Gu’ rains. The most affected areas include Garab-cad, Beer-weito, Xamilka, Dararweyne, Dunuble, Dhabar Mabac, Kal-Qac, Kalsheeshk, Ceelmidgaan, Dhabar-dalool and Barigeli.

“The rains were not enough to counter the effects of the drought in the area but at least livestock deaths have stopped, even though nomads recently moved to Yufle area in Erigavo District where the rains were better,” Mire said.

Source: IRIN