How climate change intensifies poverty in Bangladesh

Poverty is strongly related to climate change. Sometimes, the links between the two are direct — for example, climate change, by adversely affecting agriculture, directly impacts poverty.  

But the negative relationship between climate change and poverty may be indirect too. For example, climate change, by contributing to floods, destroys houses and dwellings, which enhances human deprivations.

Climate change affects, more or less, four natural or environmental dimensions: the possibilities of cyclones, the extent of drought, the advent of floods, and the salinity of lands. All of these have impacts on poverty. 

Cyclones and floods induced by climate change, for instance, destroy crops. Drought and salinity reduce the productivity of arable land and hence reduce crop production. As crop lands remain submerged under water because of floods, the most fertile topsoil of the land gets washed away.  

Salinity also reduces fertility of arable land. Together, they adversely affect the future agricultural production. Thus, climate change reduces food production and endangers food security of a country.

Cyclones and floods destroy human habitat as well as cattle and poultry. So, the general assets and the productive assets of people are lost. Cyclones and floods limit economic activities, and therefore, employment opportunities become marginal. 

During the four decades between 1980 and 2019, Bangladesh faced more than 250 weather and climate-related disasters, resulting in more than 160,000 deaths and affecting more than 60 million lives. These disasters were estimated to have resulted in a loss of $1.7 billion (purchasing power parity).

The communication system of the affected areas gets destroyed, as a result of which, on one hand, the economic activities shrink, and on the other, education and health services are adversely affected. New diseases emerge due to climate change and different kinds of health problems appear. 

Climate change also increases the chances of earthquakes, landslides, and extreme temperatures. In addition, there are two critical channels through which climate change affects human lives and living. 

First, a large part of the poor and marginalised population lives on environmentally fragile lands, such as chars, haors or coastal areas. Climate change creates a group of environmentally poor people, and a number of them become environmental refugees. 

Second, the poorer people, for many reasons, depend on biodiversity for their lives and livelihoods. They cut wood from the forests for livelihoods; they consume fruits and vegetables, which grow in forests; they use herbal plants and leaves as medicines; and also use flowers and leaves from the forests for dyeing during their festivities. 

Different species of insects and worms play a major role in agriculture. Trees and plants provide oxygen to humans. If climate change destroys biodiversity, that adversely impacts human lives. 

Bangladesh is a low-lying deltaic country formed by the Padma, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna rivers. As such, the country is prone to natural disasters. The country is affected by both rapid- and slow-onset floods, which account for the majority of its disasters. 

But the geographical variations of disasters are quite diverse and the nature of different types of disasters across the country is quite different. The three-fourths of disasters (73 per cent) in Bangladesh are due to storms and floods. 

Extreme weather, which is mostly due to climate change, accounts for about 10% of the disasters of the country. Along with all these, there are earthquakes, salinity, landslides, drought etc. 

The incidence of floods is all over Bangladesh. About one-third of the country's population lives in coastal areas where various natural disasters, for example, cyclones, storms, sea-level rise and tidal waves, occur. 

The drought areas in the north-western areas of Bangladesh are a real problem. The seasonal drought between March and October of every year disrupts the lives and living of thousands of farmers in the north-western districts of Bangladesh. 

In April to June, flash floods are frequent in several regions, particularly in the north-eastern region, which remains most vulnerable to such floods.  Additional damages due to accompanying landslides, river erosion, and soil degradation are common in the country.  Urban flooding and water-logging are common in the urban areas of the Padma-Brahmaputra Delta, which includes Dhaka, Chattogram and Khulna. 

During the four decades between 1980 and 2019, Bangladesh faced more than 250 weather- and climate-related disasters, resulting in more than 160,000 deaths and affecting more than 60 million lives. These disasters were estimated to have resulted in a loss of $1.7 billion (purchasing power parity). 

There is considerable evidence that people are unable to absorb the adverse effects of natural disasters in the short-run. For example, only during the 1998 flood, the value of different kinds of assets of more than half of the affected households has depleted by 16% and the expected price of that years' crop production dropped by 24%. Those losses had significant ramifications for households' food security, health outcome, money spent on children's schooling, which were reduced by an increase in household expenditure on food. 

In the short-run, cyclones and floods result in negative wages effects, particularly on agricultural wages. The impact of natural disasters on wages in the non-agricultural sectors depend on the contexts. Interestingly, the overall relationship between the occurrence of extreme floods and long-term wages is positive. This is due to the fact that abnormally high floods have typically resulted in above-normal harvest of dry season crops in Bangladesh. 

In Bangladesh, there is a strong link between climate change-induced natural disasters and poverty and resilience, especially in the short-run. Even though the poorer groups of the society mainly bear the brunt of disasters, they can cope quickly with the disasters and their aftermath. 

In order to reduce the negative impacts of natural disasters, the poorer population adopts different strategies. For example, they take loans from microcredit programmes or microcredit institutions. This is because they have very meagre savings, which do not provide any cushion for their social protection. 

As a result, they do not have any alternative to loans. If some poorer groups have different ex-ante income sources before the disasters, that helps those groups to cope with the hazards. 

For example, families which have earning members in the Middle East, are better positioned to combat disasters due to remittances sent from abroad. Even if there may be some temporary local migrations because of floods, that is never treated as a permanent solution. If not absolutely forced, people do not want to leave their homes. 

Social media and political connections play a role to make resources and assistance available to people. Those, who live in urban slums, may be illiterate and they may lack resources, but their capabilities in combating disasters are solid.

Climate change acts as a dynamic process for creating poverty and disparities in Bangladesh. In that context, the combating strategies against climate change must be integrated in the overall development planning of Bangladesh. This is because, in the ultimate analysis, climate change is not only an environmental concern, but it is also a development problem as well. 

Dr Selim Jahan. Sketch: TBS

Dr Selim Jahan is the Former Director of the Human Development Report Office and Poverty Division at the United Nations Development Programme, New York, US

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.