Currently, around 63 percent of Bangladesh’s energy comes from natural gas. While the government is exploring alternate renewable energy sources, the country is already enduring a massive energy crisis leading to widespread load-shedding. Bangladesh can’t just simply make the switch from one energy source to another. However, developed nations could funnel resources towards Bangladeshi projects to develop renewable, well-explored sources of energy such as tidal and wind, stopping a bad situation from getting worse.
Climate adaptation is just as necessary as climate mitigation. Developed countries could aid in numerous climate adaptability projects, including working with local farmers to develop new agricultural practices less vulnerable to the floods, strengthening coastal tracts of land, preventing the salinization of already scarce drinking water, or building “climate-friendly towns.” While NGOs have aided Bangladesh in these ventures, developed countries should also use their own resources in this transformation.
But climate change devastation simply can’t be avoided through mitigation and adaptation techniques alone: frontline countries need financial support to repair from inevitable disasters. The economic costs among developing countries for these losses and damages is expected to reach $200-580 billion by 2030. The Glasgow Dialogue was established by the 2021 UN Climate Change conference (or colloquially, COP26) in response to calls from developing nations regarding assistance during environmental climate crises. Zowa Shawoo, scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, outlines different principles the UN and developed nations could use for financing loss and damage, like providing a needs-based finance on a country-by-country basis or ensuring that national systems are used to distribute the funds.
All countries owe climate refugees recognition and safe harbor. Over 21.5 million people across the world have already been displaced due to climate change. However, many countries, including the US, don’t actually recognize climate refugees as “refugees”. Those who face persecution not from other people but from human-induced environmental threats are often unable to apply for asylum or access shelter, food, or basic necessities. This neglect causes climate refugees to , as NPR puts it, “fall between the cracks”.
Developed nations act less concerned about climate change because, in the next few decades, at least, disasters and sea-level changes won’t entirely disrupt or affect them (and also because corporations profit off environmental degradation). But we fail to recognize how global and interconnected our world is now. Bangladesh, for instance, is among the top exporters of textiles in the world. When it goes underwater, that void can’t easily be filled by some other developing country taking up the burden. While climate change losses may seem relatively small now, the positive feedback loop of global warming means each and every one of them will have massive global ramifications in the future.
At its core, climate change is a form of genocide — not only human and environmental genocide, but cultural genocide too. With every inch of Bangladesh that goes under, every village that’s lost, every province flooded, a part of Bengali culture disappears with it: customs forgotten, ancestral homelands abandoned and submerged. Those of us from developing and formerly colonized countries have already lost so much, have already had so much of our histories erased through the imperialism and dehumanization of our peoples. We are strong—undergoing colonization necessitated that strength—but how much more can we bear?
If Bangladesh sinks – when Bangladesh sinks – it won’t be an abstract environmental loss, but the last breath of a people that started dying the minute the British landed on Indian soil. Developed countries created this climate disaster. Now they need to fix it.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tapti Sen.
Tapti Sen | Radio Free (2023-06-19T05:46:09+00:00) The Modern Form of Colonialism: Climate Change. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/19/the-modern-form-of-colonialism-climate-change/
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