For climate migrants in Bangladesh, town offers new life

MONGLA, Bangladesh (AP) — The 29-year-old Monira Khatun was devastated after her husband abandoned her suddenly. She returned to her father only to face another blow: He died soon after, leaving her to shoulder three other family members' care. Without any work, she was worried about how she would feed them.

“I lost everything. There was darkness all around,” Khatun said. “My parents’ home was gone to the river for erosion, we had no land to cultivate.”

She ended up working at a factory in a special economic zone that employs thousands of climate refugees — like Khatun — in the southwestern town of Mongla, where Bangladesh’s second-largest seaport is located.

These refugees from climate-impacted areas within Bangladesh lost their homes, land and livelihood, but found a new life in the riverside coastal town about 50 kilometers (30 miles) inland from the Bay of Bengal.

Some 150,000 people now live in Mongla — many of whom moved from villages near the Sundarbans forest, the world’s largest mangrove forest which straddles the border of Bangladesh and India and harbors endangered Bengal tigers.

Being forced by climate change to move, within borders or beyond, is a growing reality expected to accelerate in the decades ahead. Over the next 30 years, 143 million people are likely to be uprooted by rising seas, drought, searing temperatures and other climate catastrophes, according to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report published last month by the United Nations. Leaders in Asia, already one of the hardest-hit continents, are scrambling to confront major changes taking place.

Climate scientists like Saleemul Huq, director of the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development, are branding Mongla as a climate-resilient town for the...