Before Cyclone Aila battered the southwestern coast of Bangladesh in 2009, Vikas Das lived with his family in a coastal hamlet, tending a small vegetable plot and fishing in a nearby river.As the powerful storm submerged the region, killing hundreds and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee, the Das family sought shelter in a nearby village.Hoping to rebuild, Das rented a house with some government and charity assistance and resumed fishing and farming. For several years, the family managed, but the cyclones kept returning, salinating the river, eroding the soil, and diminishing fish and crop yields.With the water levels rising each year, the family faced a relentless chore: constantly moving their ramshackle house to safety.”We needed extra money to lift the house every month,” Das said in an interview with VOA.The unending struggle eventually drove Das to Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital, where he took a job he never envisioned for himself: driving a rickshaw to support his family.”I did not study that much,” said Das, who now lives in a Dhaka slum. “I started driving a rickshaw because I didn’t know anything else.”While many Cyclone Aila survivors returned to their villages, countless others like Das ended up in Dhaka and other distant cities, living in overcrowded slums and enduring poverty.
FILE – In this photo taken May 14, 2010, a villager rows a boat past the cyclone-affected Gabura village, in Bangladesh.
The country’s climate migrant population has continued to swell since Alia. Last year, Bangladesh saw an estimated 1.8 million internal displacements due to disasters, ranking it among the top five countries globally, according to the International Displacement Monitoring Center.With the country ranking high on the list of climate disaster risks, experts warn Bangladesh’s climate migration crisis could worsen without action. The World Bank predicts that Bangladesh could have 13.3 million internal climate migrants by 2050.South Asia’s climate woesSouth Asia is a climate change hot spot, with ever more intense cyclones, storms, floods, droughts and heat waves displacing millions every year. Last year, natural disasters displaced 2.9 million people across the region: Afghanistan had 1.5 million IDPs, Pakistan 1.2 million, India 90,000 and Bangladesh 55,000, according to IDMC.”In Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, the migration trends are very rapid. They occur almost every year,” said Zainab Naeem, a research fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI).Worldwide, more than 26 million people were newly displaced by natural disasters last year, according to the IDMC, many of them driven from their homes by floods.The World Bank says climate change could force as many as 216 million people to migrate within their own countries by 2050.COP29 gives attention to migrationThough the link between climate change and migration has long been recognized, it wasn’t always a focus of policymakers and activists. That changed last year, as t