In or out of the headlines, the impact of climate change on poor people is equally deadly, writes Ben Beaumont.

I received some harrowing images this morning, of the aftermath of a cyclone which hit parts of India and Bangladesh over the weekend. As cyclones go, it wasn’t big enough to make much of an impression on our UK media, but that hasn’t made Cyclone Aila any less devastating for the communities caught in its path ( see Oxfam researcher Sandhya Suri’s eyewitness account for an idea of its impact).
 

A Bangladeshi woman walks through the flood with her children after cyclone Aila hit [Photo credit: Abir Abdullah/EPA].

Maybe it says something about the sheer number of bad news events that we ‘consume’ every single day, but disasters like this only really hit home when people can make a personal connection - maybe it was a recent holiday destination, or a relative lived there for a while.  I’m no different on this score, it seems - one of the reasons these distressing photos had such an impact on me is that I visited Satkhira, one of the worst-affected areas, only a few months ago.

Satkhira is a poor coastal district in the south-western corner of Bangladesh.  This area is especially vulnerable to rising sea levels caused by climate change. The storm surges and high tides that follow cyclones are flooding these areas like never before, destroying homes and crops, and, tragically, taking lives.

Some of the images we were sent from our photographer are too upsetting to publish here. With any disaster event, it is always women and children who are worst affected. Tragically, Cyclone Aila was no different. Our translator told us of “13 corpses laid out, 8 children, the rest women” by a cyclone shelter. The grief in the images was palpable. Just a few months ago, I may have been playing with those children, or talking with their mothers about the rising sea level.

A Bangladeshi woman wades through the flood in search of drinking water [Abir Abdullah/EPA].

Ultimately, what these images mean to me is this: climate change costs lives. You can’t say it often enough, or put it more simply.

Read about Oxfam’s response to Cyclone Aila, donate to the Cyclone Aila emergency response or find out more about climate change in Bangladesh here.

Tags: Bangladesh, climate change, cyclone, cyclone aila, India

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 4:31 pm and is filed under General, News Blog, You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.