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Bangladesh’s Stability Threatened by Natural Disasters, Migration, Terrorism
›December 13, 2007 // By Thomas RenardLast month, Cyclone Sidr killed thousands of Bangladeshis and displaced thousands more. Yet natural disasters are not the only threats facing Bangladesh. Dhaka is struggling to control three interrelated challenges: natural disasters, conflict with India, and international terrorism.
- Bangladesh is among the countries most severely affected by natural disasters. UN statistics illustrate the extent of these almost-annual catastrophes. Two wind storms killed 300,000 and 140,000 in 1970 and 1971, while floods affected 38 million in 1974 and 78 million in 1987.
- Repeated environmental disasters have triggered migration within Bangladesh, but also into India, and these migrations have sometimes led to conflict. Rafael Reuveny found that past environmental migrations within Bangladesh and between Bangladesh and India have already triggered high-intensity conflict, mainly along ethnic lines. Generally, conflict arises as a result of competition for land, water, and jobs. But Indians are also concerned about the “Bangladeshization” of the states of Assam and Tripura. According to recent voting records, reports the Christian Science Monitor, 99 percent of the residents living on the Indian side of the India-Bangladesh border are Bangladeshi immigrants. In order to reduce and manage immigration, India has been building a 2,500-mile long, 12-foot high double fence packed with razor wire along its border.
- In his article “Al Qaeda Strikes Back” in Foreign Affairs earlier this year, Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, warned that Bangladesh could become an important base for al Qaeda. “The Jihad Movement in Bangladesh was one of the original signatories of bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war on the West,” he said. In 2006, “as bitter feuding between the two main political parties was increasingly ripping the country apart, there were growing indications that Bangladeshi fundamentalist groups were becoming radicalized. The political meltdown now under way in the capital, Dhaka, is creating the type of fractious environment in which al Qaeda thrives.”
Now, climate change could make the above challenges even worse. “Climate change is a threat multiplier,” Environmental Change and Security Program Director Geoff Dabelko told the Christian Science Monitor. “It’s not that it creates a whole new set of problems, it’s that it will make things that are already a problem worse.” Climate change is likely to make natural disasters more frequent and more powerful; to increase the frequency and extent of environmental migrations; and to increase grievances and the likelihood of state failure, both of which could facilitate terrorism.
- Bangladesh is among the countries most severely affected by natural disasters. UN statistics illustrate the extent of these almost-annual catastrophes. Two wind storms killed 300,000 and 140,000 in 1970 and 1971, while floods affected 38 million in 1974 and 78 million in 1987.
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New Reading: Environment, Population, and Security in Africa
›November 16, 2007 // By Thomas RenardThe November issue of International Affairs focuses on security issues in Africa, with several articles investigating the links among environment, population, and security.
Chatham House’s Nicholas Shaxson explores poverty and bad governance in oil-rich countries in the Gulf of Guinea. “Oil, corruption and the resource curse” builds on the author’s extensive research into the politics of oil in sub-Saharan Africa, including interviews with numerous key players.
“Climate change as the ‘new’ security threat: implications for Africa,” by Oli Brown, Anne Hammill, and Robert McLeman, reviews the linkages between climate change and security in Africa. Climate change could precipitate socio-economic and political collapse, the authors say. However, good adaptation policies could help prevent environmental stresses from triggering conflict.
In “Human security and development in Africa,” Nana K. Poku, Neil Renwick, and Joao Gomes Porto note that Africa is unlikely to achieve a single Millennium Development Goal by the target year of 2015. Arguing that security and development are closely intertwined, they identify four critical developmental security issues: ensuring peace and security; fostering good governance; fighting HIV/ AIDS; and managing the debt crisis.
Finally, David Styan of Birkbeck College, London, examines the relationship between international migration and African economic security in his article “The security of Africans beyond borders: migration, remittances and London’s transnational entrepreneurs.” -
Climate Change Reshapes World’s Atlas
›September 11, 2007 // By Thomas RenardClimate change has been altering the world’s geography so rapidly that cartographers can hardly keep up. The prestigious Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World was last published in 2003, and in preparation for the release of the 12th edition this year, coastlines, lakes, forests, and cities have had to be redrawn.
The Aral Sea in Central Asia has shrunk by 75 percent in 40 years, while Lake Chad in Africa is only 5 percent of its 1963 size. Furthermore, during certain times of the year, the Rio Grande, Colorado, Yellow, and Tigris rivers fail to reach the sea.
The 12th edition of the atlas contains approximately 20,000 updates. Naturally, not all the updates are consequences of climate change: 3,500 are simply name changes, and not every geographic update is the result of climate change. Also, not all the geographic changes occurred during the last four years—some happened earlier, but are only now being noticed by mapmakers, who are becoming increasingly aware of climate change-related geographical changes.
Some changes were previously unknown because they were happening in isolated parts of the world. In India, for instance, official records list 102 islands in the Sunderbans, where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal. Those islands are inhabited by 1.8 million people. However, after a six-year study, scientists have been able to map only 100 islands, finding that the other two had been swallowed up by the sea, said Sugata Hazra, director of Calcutta’s School of Oceanography Studies at Jadavpur University. Scientists estimate that the submersion of the two islands rendered approximately 10,000 people homeless.
Rising sea levels—which threaten to submerge some 12 additional islands in the Sunderbans—are sometimes perceptible to the human eye. In Bangladesh, many islands disappear each year, forcing populations to migrate from island to island and to live in extremely precarious conditions. As Shahidul Mullah, who lives with his family on a small island in Bangladesh, told Spiegel Online, “When I moved here, we still had three fields in front of the house. Now there are only two. I’m afraid the water will take another piece away from me this year.” -
Warming Up to Migration: Labor Mobility and Climate Change
›August 1, 2007 // By Karima TawfikTraveling across national borders to find work should be treated as a legitimate response to climate change, says the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Oli Brown in a new policy paper on climate change and labor mobility.
Both Brown and ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko, who recently weighed in on climate change and migration on The New Security Beat, believe that climate change is an increasingly important driver of migration. However, it is difficult to isolate a causal relationship between climate change and migration because other factors—such as population growth, economics, and politics—are inextricably intertwined with climate’s impact on migration patterns. Brown and Dabelko both stress that the difficulties of measuring climate change’s effect on migration should not prevent policymakers from addressing the relationship between the two, however.Brown explains that labor migration has become an important coping strategy in drought-stricken Africa. During dry periods, young adults leave their rural homes and head for the cities, hoping to earn money for their families. Brown recommends increasing the flexibility of international migration laws to make it easier for people to travel across national borders to earn a living, but he also urges developing nations to curb the “brain drain” phenomenon by adopting incentives for workers to remain in their home countries. Moreover, he argues that wealthy developed countries, which tend to see migration as a failure of adaptation and often oppose relaxing immigration or refugee policies, should accept environmental stress as a legitimate reason for migration.
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