How Bangladeshis are adapting to climate change - chicken farmer now raises ducks

According to Ngoc Nguyen of New America Media, Mohammed Khan was a child when the "deadliest cyclone ever recorded" struck Bangladesh - at the time East Pakistan - in 1970, killing as many "as half a million people." Khan, 51, who now lives in Queens, New York, has a daughter and more than 200 family members in Bangladesh. He’s worried about how his large extended family will fare when the next cyclone strikes and he fears climate change will worsen such disasters.

“America as a leader should help all the poor and affected countries, including Bangladesh,” Khan says. “Affected families are dying without food, without a roof over their heads. We should provide financial assistance and even bring them here.”

Hasan Rahim, a software engineering consultant based in San Jose, California, says Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was a wake-up call for him and many Bangladeshis in Silicon Valley.

Bangladeshis have already had to adapt to higher sea levels, Rahim says. “People who raised chickens are now raising ducks,” he says, and farmers are experimenting with “floating seed beds” to save crops during floods.

Queens (NY) resident Sheikh Islam says there’s more recognition now that climate change is the cause of refugees pouring into the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. “They thought the migrants who came to the city were just jobless and landless. Now, the government is mentioning that they are jobless and landless because of climate change,” he says.

Islam says there’s also a growing perception that Western developed countries bear more responsibility for the problem because they contribute the most to carbon emissions blamed for global warming.