Floods have taken the lives of more than 100 people in northern Bangladesh over the last two weeks. Fully one third of the country has been flooded and some 600,000 people have been displaced in the riverine nation as a result of monsoons in India and Nepal. At international climate forums, Bangladeshi diplomats consistently decry such disasters as part of their urgent calls for action to mitigate changing weather patterns worldwide. But here in the country’s Rangpur-Kurigam region, both authorities and citizens have been reluctant to attribute these deadly disasters to the effects of climate change.

Views From the Flood Zone

As part of a team of social scientists from American University (Washington, DC,) and North South University (Dhaka, Bangladesh), we have been traveling the country to find out why.  Authorities, already taxed by emergency relief expenditures to help citizens recover from July’s floods, do not seem eager to acknowledge yet another crisis (especially when Bangladesh’s government and its Supreme Court are embroiled in a battle for authority).  The government may also be trying to avoid drawing attention to the fact that much of the flooding has come from the opening of a dam upstream on the Teesta River in India, as the two nations currently enjoy strong bilateral relations.

In addition, government officials may be hesitant to label the current crisis with an abstract, diffuse concept that is more of a long-term issue, said North South University researcher Salahuddin M. Aminuzzaman. Government officials are extremely willing to “call out” natural disasters like cyclones, monsoons, floods and drought, he said; governments can provide short-term relief for concrete, short-term problems like disasters, and, if they are organized, they can improve their stock among voters.  But climate change is an amorphous, distant, and foreboding challenge.

Flood victims share the perception that while the government is able to successfully manage emergencies (which occur more frequently in Bangladesh than in most of the world), its overall level of service provision is lower than other governments’.  Mohammad Abul Kasheem, a lifelong resident of Panjar Bhanga, near Rangpur, told us, “When there is no disaster, the government forgets us.”  The more than a dozen people we questioned in Panjar Bhanga were mostly stoic, insisting they themselves were responsible for restoring order and recovering from yet another natural disaster.

A group of extreme weather migrants, who moved from the Bonsail region in the wake of the 1990s cyclones to Dhaka’s Korail slum, were much less accepting of their circumstances.  These rickshaw drivers, domestic servants, and textile line workers said that while they were glad to have moved to the city where they could get “good food” (chicken and fish), pirated electricity, and primary school for their kids, they aspired to more.  Having moved, sometimes with “tears in their eyes,” from subsistence farms, they wanted better educations for their kids and to own their land outright, rather than “squatting” in laminate-roofed huts with illegal electricity and gas hook-ups. But very few of the dozens of citizens we interviewed in this slum of 175,000 people, just blocks from Dhaka’s most elite neighborhood, had heard of climate change or said it was the government’s responsibility to address it

Climate Change, Natural Disaster, or God’s Will?

Industrial nations are also far from blameless.  Whether the dominant polluting nations – led by China, the United States, and India – might, via the United Nations,  pay “loss and damages” to the world’s most vulnerable nations, like Bangladesh, has not been resolved.  And despite widespread and increasing acceptance of climate change by U.S. citizens, the Trump administration has signaled that it will withdraw the United States from the watershed 2015 UN Paris Agreement. At November’s climate negotiations in Bonn, we will likely see more calls by Bangladesh’s diplomats and the other vulnerable nations for international loss and damage provisions, and continued foot-dragging by the industrial nations, now likely to be led by China and Germany.

A disconnect seems to exist, which our research team hopes to further study, between the embrace of climate change by diplomats from vulnerable countries playing “the victim card” (in the words of one Bangladeshi researcher), the reluctance of government officials to publicly refer to climate change in the aftermath of flooding, and the views of citizens, who accept conditions as “God’s will” when in flood-prone areas, but demand change after migrating to Dhaka and learning that they could expect more.

One possible explanation for the disconnect can be found in public opinion research from Ecuador’s Amazon region that indicates that citizens have weaker environmental attitudes after the environment has been damaged. Instead, they see environmental problems as issues of public health, economic need, and urban migration, rather than part of the more abstract concept of environmental degradation. 

Beyond Immediate Relief: Look for Long-Term Solutions

It is time for all of us to pay closer attention to what is happening in Bangladesh.  For the benefit of the millions of people in South Asia whose vulnerability to climate change has been dramatically exposed yet again, we hope that wider recognition and public education of the problems caused by climate change can be implemented in time to influence authorities in Bangladesh and in the major emitting nations.

Several officials at the Bangladeshi Meteorological Department that our research team met with this week insisted that despite an increase of more than one degree Fahrenheit since 1971 and increasingly unpredictable extreme weather events, they have insufficient data to declare that climate change has arrived.  “We do not speak up in government meetings on the issue [even if we disagree that climate change is definitely the cause], however,” said one of the candid meteorologists, “because we do know that talking about climate change [as a source of problems] means there will be an increase in our budget.”

International and domestic emergency assistance are of course necessary, but we also need to see these problems as what they really are: manifestations of massive changes in our ecosystems that transcend national boundaries.  While many, like Bangladesh authorities, are tempted to label these catastrophes as “natural disasters,” provide immediate relief, and remain complacent, to truly protect people, we must understand that these events are likely consequences of the bigger worldwide problem of climate change.