FROM THE FIELD
Ben Beaumont is returning to Bangladesh to pass on messages of support to vulnerable people already being hit by climate change. First watch my video... Submit your question or comment Later this summer, I'm going back to Char Atra, a river island in Bangladesh that I've visited a couple of times during the past year. You may have seen some of the films we made while I was last there. I met some amazing people - real characters like Hasina and Keya, as well as tough mothers like Sufia and Salma, who are all showing so much resilience as climate change makes their lives even more precarious. Sufia and Hasina's home island has always been vulnerable to floods and river erosion, long before anyone began to worry about "global warming". After all, pretty much the whole of Bangladesh is a giant flood plain for the enormous rivers Ganges and Brahmaputra. So it's understandable that when we've shown the films to some people, they argue that what Hasina and Sufia are experiencing isn't due to climate change. It's the result of millions upon millions of people living on vulnerable low-lying land, in this vast, ever-changing river delta. And they'd have a point. Millions of people do live on vulnerable land, and they can't move away. People here are incredibly poor. All the factors that make Bangladesh poor - not least geography, but also its troubled, not-so-distant past, population growth, unfair trade, the lack of education, the list goes on and on - are, tragically, well established. But this is precisely why climate change is such a catastrophe for Bangladesh. It was already desperately poor. Its people were already among the most vulnerable on our planet. And now, climate change is making things even worse. The floods - on which so many here depend to grow their rice and keep their land fertile - are becoming deeper, longer lasting, and more unpredictable. The rising sea threatens to inundate huge chunks of land which are below the existing sea level. Proud, hard-working Bangladeshis - Sufia, Hasina, and Keya among them - are having to cope, adapt, and struggle as never before. This is why we need urgent action on this issue - with all our focus going into a positive outcome from the UN climate change talks in Copenhagen this December. And it's also why I'm going back to Char Atra. I care about what's happening to the people I've met there, and I want to show them how many many other people in the UK care too. If you send me your questions and messages of support, I'll do my best to take them to the community - and I'll show you their responses when I get back. Watch this film and submit your message.[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
