Photos by Nicki Bennet

Nicki

Nicki Bennett is an American aid worker who bounces around from one hot spot to the next, working for Oxfam. She has been deployed to Sudan, eastern Congo, Chad, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia and Guatemala. She is currently in Bangladesh working on post-hurricane reconstruction.

This week I’m back in Dhaka, the world’s undisputed rickshaw capital. With more than 300,000 of these brightly colored bicycle contraptions plying the city’s streets for trade, I rarely walk for more than a block before a rickshaw driver (known as “rickshaw-wallah”) pulls up next to me and urges me to hop on board.

I’ve learned it’s almost impossible to refuse a ride. This is partly because the rickshaw-wallahs are very persistent, partly because I feel I should be supporting people struggling to make a living (one in five of the city’s inhabitants depends on the rickshaw business for their income) and partly because Dhaka is now starting to get unbearably hot and humid (and I’m starting to get horrendously lazy).

Coming back from a meeting near my office this afternoon, I start chatting (well, mainly hand-gesturing) with my rickshaw-wallah and ask him where he’s from. I’ve heard lots of stories about families in the cyclone-affected coastal areas sending sons or brothers to urban centers like Dhaka to make a little bit of cash driving rickshaws (many people have not been able to return to their regular jobs as the cyclone destroyed their fishing boats and nets or washed away their crops). I’m wondering if my rickshaw-wallah is one of them.

Instead, he names a district that I’ve never heard of. We manage to establish that it’s somewhere north of Dhaka, near a river. “Floods,” he tells me. “In my village. Village underwater.” Finally the penny drops – he’s not just an economic migrant, he’s also a “climate migrant.”

Few countries in the world are more acutely threatened by climate-related disasters and climate change than Bangladesh. The country (70 percent of which consists of flood plain) is already sinking – within the next two decades Bangladesh may lose as much as 20 percent of its land to rising
sea levels and melting Himalayan glaciers. This is not good news in a country of 150 million people - even a relatively moderate 10 or 20 centimeters rise in sea level could displace millions within the next 15 years. Population density is already high, with approximately 1045 Bangladeshis crammed into each square kilometer of land.

Following last year’s scientific breakthrough (and the publication of the IPCC climate change report), it’s no longer possible for anyone to deny that global warming is happening. It’s also pretty clear that the biggest polluters are not poor countries like Bangladesh, but wealthy nations like the United States, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Canada. The rich countries have committed themselves to doing two things - cutting their greenhouse gas emissions and setting up a fund that helps poor countries cope with the damage already being caused by climate change.

Back at the office, feeling curious, I decide to conduct a quick (and totally unscientific) experiment to check how much people in the United States actually care about the issue: I log onto the websites of the main U.S. presidential candidates to see if they have a position on climate change. Some of them talk about cutting greenhouse gas emissions. None talk about paying money into the climate change “adaptation” fund. And none are talking about the impact of climate change on poor people – or what they might do about the fact that places like Bangladesh and New Orleans are already being bashed by climate-related disasters and slowly losing land to rising sea levels.

I’m sure my rickshaw-wallah is not exactly thinking about climate change or politics as he reaches for a grimy piece of cloth to wipe his sweaty brow at the end of my journey. But as someone who spend his waking hours inhaling a potent mix of lead and carbon monoxide and has a life expectancy of only 45 years, he may be thinking about other ways of making a living. I have a feeling he would not be averse to discussing alternative job opportunities with those who have the power to provide the scale of finance Bangladesh needs to help it adapt to climate change. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if we are ready to listen to him just quite yet.