Dhaka’s climate migrants say extreme heat makes their new home ‘hell’
By Mosabber Hossain
On a hot evening on the bustling streets in Mohakhali, a busy commercial district in Bangladesh’s capital, Anzu Ara is frying hotcakes. She is exhausted and dirty after a long day working over her roadside stove amid the traffic exhaust but she needs to make as many more sales as she can.
“My 5-year-old son and my old mother will not be able to eat if I stop,” she said. “Rent is high. Electricity, gas and water are high.”
Until two years ago, Ara farmed rice and vegetables in Sunamganj, near the border with India in northeast Bangladesh. But after a flood ruined her home and drowned her land, and her husband left her, she had little choice but to come to Dhaka with her mother and young son to look for work.
Ara is one of an estimated half million rural and coastal Bangladeshis driven to Bangladesh’s capital each year in search of new homes and work, often after losing their land or homes to flooding or other extreme weather fueled by climate change, according to Bangladesh’s climate change ministry.
Floods in August alone affected 5.7 million of the country’s approximately 180 million people, killing more than 60 and leaving many others homeless, according to government estimates.
But the growing stream of migrants to Dhaka, many of them escaping flood losses, find themselves facing new climate change-related threats in the city’s sprawling slums, including increasingly extreme heat.
The U.N. children’s agency UNICEF estimates that 4 million people now live in Dhaka’s informal settlements, with three in four households sharing just one room, often without access to clean water or sufficient sanitation services.
Packed into tin-roofed homes with little ventilation, they are struggling to cope with heat extremes that are often harsher in urban areas with little green shade and stretches of heat-absorbing concrete.
“The weather is very hot. It’s even hotter when we run the stove,” Ara said. But with bills to pay and food to buy, “I have no way to stop my work in such hot weather. And there is no way to return to my village.”
hotter city
Dhaka, an already steamy city, is seeing increasing brutal summer temperatures.
The number of days that temperatures reach at least 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) has risen by 97 percent over the last three decades, according to research by the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
“People in informal settlements, in particular, are struggling to cope as extreme heat becomes more frequent,” said Anna Walnycki, a researcher on urban poverty and climate justice issues for IIED.
Limited incomes, poor housing and inadequate access to water and electricity - which could help residents keep cool - mean that “without action, the situation is only going to get worse,” she said, calling for new strategies to manage fast-rising heat impacts.
Migrant women, in particular, face disproportionate threats from heat, said Farhana Sultana, a geography and environment professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs in the United States.
Many hold low-paying, insecure jobs that can leave them vulnerable to heat stress, and live in densely packed areas, in corrugated tin huts with too little airflow, she said. Most also have little access to cooling green spaces or affordable clean water which “adds to their vulnerability to heat stress,” Sultana said.
A study published this month by a global team of researchers found cities in the Global South had 30 percent less cooling capacity from urban green areas than Global North cities, and noted green spaces can drop surface temperatures in cities by about 3 degrees Celsius.
“Urban greenery is a really effective way of tackling what can be fatal effects of extreme heat and humidity,” said Tim Lenton, of the Global Systems Institute at England’s University of Exeter, one of the authors of the study.
'i feel suffocated'
Aklima Begum, a 70-year-old migrant to Dhaka, has little shade where she works each day slicing vegetables in a market in the capital’s Mohammadpur area.
“A few hours ago rain came but the weather is getting hotter than usual. Rain used to cool the weather but now it’s not working,” she said, wiping sheets of sweat from her face as she cut aram - a local yam - in the 35 degree Celsius heat.
Driven to Dhaka six years ago when flooding ruined her home in Satkhira, in southwest Bangladesh, Begum said she finds the urban heat increasingly stifling.
“I have to change my clothes twice a day. I drink enough water but remain thirsty,” she said. At home, “my narrow room doesn’t allow me enough fresh air. I feel suffocated.”
“Heat,” she said, “makes my life hell.”
Low-lying, heavily populated Bangladesh is considered one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. The World Bank projects the total number of people displaced within the country because of climate change impacts could reach 13.3 million by 2050.
But Bangladesh is also a global leader in adaptation to climate impacts and efforts to reduce disaster risk. A network of raised coastal storm shelters has slashed deaths from cyclones over the last half century, while floating hospitals, schools and vegetable beds have helped communities keep functioning even as floods - a longtime hazard in the low-lying country - grow more powerful and erratic.
Still, adaptation to fast-worsening heat extremes will require additional work and investment, experts say.
“With ever-increasing climate risks, further adaptation efforts are vital, and a low-carbon development path is critical to a resilient future for Bangladesh,” Martin Raiser, the World Bank’s vice president for South Asia, said in a press statement.
Help can’t come soon enough for Bashna Banu, who once caught fish in the River Tista in northern Bangladesh but now cleans them for a living in a steamy Dhaka fish market, earning too little to buy any good quality filets herself.
Pushed to the city after she lost her home to floods, the 24-year-old migrant said she feels alone and often struggles to cope with the city’s increasingly overwhelming pressures, including extreme heat.
“I see how the heat is destroying the fish, like it is destroying me,” she said. “I can’t work properly. Floods have not only pushed me to the slums but into this hot city where there is no life and no hope.”
“At the end of the day, we are refugees and outsiders,” she said, wiping her face - and then her eyes.