How Bangladesh’s poor are paying the costs of climate damage

When Cyclone Yaas slammed into her home in southwest Bangladesh in May, destroying it and sweeping away in the floodwaters the small amount of cash she had saved, Amina Begum had few options.

Efforts to recover from four previous cyclones since 2009 had depleted her resources, and her husband’s death five years ago left the burden of caring for their two children solely to her.

So Begum took the only option available: She sold her gold wedding earrings, her last valuable, for Tk5,000 ($58) and moved with her children to Notun Bazar, a slum in Khulna, the nearest big city.

“There was nothing else left to me,” she said, standing in the narrow alleyways of her new neighbourhood, where the pungent smell of rotting food fills the air and mosquitoes torment residents at night.

She now earns about Tk400 ($4.70) a day as a day labourer in the city, most of which goes to pay for the tiny rooms she rents. She said she no longer has any savings.

As climate change disasters and losses surge around the world, the world’s poorest, who can least afford it, are paying the bulk of the costs, making them effectively the world’s “silent financiers” of climate losses and adaptation efforts, researchers say.

That is a reality largely still unrecognised internationally, said Paul Steele, chief economist for the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

The poor in countries such as Bangladesh are facing an “impossible situation” trying to pay for losses they and others in poor countries - most of them low contributors to climate-changing emissions - did not cause, he said.

Altogether, rural families in Bangladesh are estimated to be spending Tk158 billion (almost $2 billion) a year to repair climate damage or try to prevent it, research by IIED, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and Britain’s Kingston University found.

That is twice the amount contributed by the country’s government, which has its own national climate fund, and 12 times what Bangladesh gets from international donors, researchers found.

Mamunur Rashid, a climate change specialist with UNDP’s Bangladesh office, said the spending is diverting cash away from efforts by families to improve their lives, leaving the poor increasingly permanently stranded.

“Lots of climate-affected people in Bangladesh are fighting with all their means to adapt to climate change. This financial flow from their own development aspiration to combat climate change is not recognised as climate finance,” he said, calling the poor “the most silent financier”.

Such flows of cash are hardly unique to Bangladesh, he added, suggesting overall global spending by families on climate adaptation and losses almost certainly outstrips national and international spending.

That flood of private cash should be counted in global tallies of climate finance, he said, noting that a failure by big-emitting rich countries to financially help poorer ones deal with the consequences is set to have a big impact on everything from global security to the planet’s health.

Little help

In 2009, wealthy nations agreed to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer countries develop cleanly and adapt to climate change impacts.

But after failing to meet that goal, the governments admitted prior to the COP26 UN climate talks in Glasgow that the pledge would only be met starting in 2023 - though they promised to make up the backlog.