Deepening a canal in Kandi to prepare for floods (Photo: © James Pender/CMS) The impact of future climate change threatens Bangladesh with widespread social suffering. James Pender outlines what is being done.
In terms of the impact of climate change, although all nations on earth will be affected, few places in the world will experience the range of effects and the severity of changes that will occur in Bangladesh, where I have been working with the Church of Bangladesh’s Social Development Programme (CBSDP).
The changes there will include average weather temperatures rising, and more extreme hot and cold spells.
Change will entail rainfall being less when it is most needed for agriculture, yet even heavier in the monsoon, when it already causes floods.
It will mean the melting of glaciers in the source areas of Bangladesh’s rivers, altering the hydrological cycle.
There will be more powerful tornados and cyclones.
A jetty that suffered flood damage (Photo: © James Pender/CMS) And sea-level rise will displace communities, turn fresh water saline and facilitate more powerful storm surges.
The CBSDP is at the forefront of the effort to help communities and the environment in which they live to cope with increasingly hostile climatic conditions.
All the CBSDP’s project proposals now contain action to address these threats.
Such action includes concrete cyclone/flood shelters, raised above the ground, having been built to enable communities to escape life-threatening floods and storm surges of sea water up to eight metres high.
It has involved lines of trees being planted along roads to prevent winds blowing across fields and thereby removing their moisture, and enabling successful cultivation despite winter droughts becoming more common.
A 'Baira' flood-adapted floating vegetable nursery (Photo: © James Pender/CMS) It has meant vegetable seed and fruit trees having been distributed for the poor to plant around their homes to provide food security as crops are increasingly lost to cyclones and floods in other areas of the country, pushing up prices.
Moreover, community awareness enables villages to adapt and adopt measures that will sustain their livelihoods.
However, adaptation has limits, so the Church of Bangladesh is also involved in advocacy − in calling churches and countries in the industrialised West, which are most responsible for the current climate changes, to take mitigating action.
As the Church of Bangladesh’s bishops have visited international church conferences, time and time again they have asked their Christian brothers and sisters and fellow human beings to care about their suffering countrymen and women, to take personal action, urge their churches to do likewise and to campaign for their governments to take actions that mitigate climate change.
For as 1 Corinthians 12.25-26 states, all different parts of the Body should have the same concern for one another, “If one part of the body suffers, all the other parts suffer with it”, and those in Bangladesh are truly starting to suffer severely from the effects of climate change.
In solidarity, we need to co-operate to mitigate or stop climate change whenever and wherever we can.
James Pender is currently a mission partner in Bangladesh, where he has been based since January 2004. He is an Adviser on Development and Natural Resource with the Church of Bangladesh’s Social Development Programme (CBSDP). His main areas of work to date have been the development of the CBSDP’s Arsenic-Mitigation and Women-and-Child-Trafficking-Prevention Projects, as well as advising generally on management and organisational issues.
James got married to Dipty in November 2007. She was selected as a CMS mission partner in July 2008.
See James Pender’s full report on the impact of climate change on Bangladesh and adaptation options for communities.