#Climate#change_#Bangladesh is where it is at.
Debates on climate change are calls for fair wages and working conditions. Improvements needed in the working environment include a heightened need for water breaks and cooling – especially for those working outside or in enclosoften dominated by heated commentary from the West on its impending peril calling it the biggest threat humanity has ever faced. But here in Bangladesh, climate change is not a threat – it is an ongoing reality. In our reality, it is a slow compounding of already familiar struggles.
The worst impacts from climate change, in the form of heat stress, increased salinity, and erratic rainfall, play out within familiar struggles. They includeed cooking areas. These needs have now intensified in a hotter climate.
Elsewhere in the workforce, heat stress, salinity, and rainfall compound farmers’ struggles against falling agricultural returns and land impacts from construction and development initiatives. The familiarity of these ongoing struggles exacerbates the risk of a continuance in our usual inadequate response to demands for better working and living conditions.
So Bangladesh is facing climate change impacts full on. Not only are there physical changes, but socioeconomic fault lines are also being opened up. Economically marginalised communities continue to suffer from strains including unstable agricultural income, volatile pricing of their produce or the option of taking up urban job prospects.
Rising sea levels have left their agricultural grounds with high salinity making them less fertile. Moreover, hasty and unplanned urbanisation has left areas with inadequate drainage systems and further saltwater intrusion from export-based aquaculture have made their problems worse. So they are often pressured to sell land for less than market value and are routinely threatened with fake cases that take years and large sums of money to resolve.
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