Overcast skies over the Gulshan Banani Bridge in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo credit: Catherine Baltazar

Amidst the conversations regarding climate change, the usual questions that arises is: “who are the biggest contributors to climate change?” In most cases, the common responses are: the United States, India and China –countries with large populations. Other times, people connect the answer to this question with socioeconomic wealth and assume that countries with money can simply afford to shrug these problems away or place the burden on those with less. What if we were to take the question and reverse it: “who are the most impacted by the effects of climate change?” This questions will be at the heart of the beat I am proposing.

With four times as many people as California squeezed into an area the size of the state of Georgia, Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated nations on our planet with 156.6 million inhabitants. In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Fifth Assessment Report, which revealed various long-term implications for Bangladesh of highly probable catastrophic events and other climate change impacts. These effects would be manifested in manny forms including sea level rise, lack of economic resources, agricultural destabilization and decreasing access to safe drinking water. For Bangladeshis, the negative effects of climate change are occurring today. Every time a natural disaster hits, the people of Bangladesh muster their strength to collect their belongings and rebuild their homes, continuing where they left off. They progress at the best of their abilities. They have become the definition of resiliency. Survival, however, becomes difficult when the effects of climate change magnify the issue at hand.

The geographical location of the country, with its many rivers and tributaries, has always made the country extremely vulnerable to natural disasters. Climate change will intensify the frequency and strength of storms, which can have a rippling effect across the country. I would like to focus my beat on further understanding the implications of these effects on various communities.