Opinion Author: Meraz Mostafa Comments
Bangladesh: Dhaka

It is good if a city can think about whether it is meeting the needs for all of its people.

My grandmother remembers the northern side of Dhaka city before all the traffic. She remembers that after sunset, it was very difficult to reach the city centre because of the lack of paved roads, and there were no street lamps to light the way.

Back then, her house was surrounded by wetlands, or hoar as they are called in Bengali. She and her friends were too scared to take a boat out at night because there was no telling whether or not they would make it back — such was the expanse of the hoar.

Today, these wetlands have mostly been filled for urban construction. And what remains will be filled in due time, as concrete blocks have been laid out in a rectangular fashion, foreshadowing the urban jungle to come.

It is hard to talk about urban resilience in Dhaka without also considering how much the city has changed in the last 60 years — both in terms of the population and the sheer amount of urban construction.

In 1950, there were less than half a million people living in Dhaka; today there is over 17 million with an additional half a million reported to be migrating into the city each year

Similarly, rivers once bound the city on all sides, but these have been filled in to make way for new commercial and residential areas.

Even then, many of the people who live in Dhaka find themselves living in informal settlements, also known as slums or bhostis. Here there is little guaranteed access to electricity and clean drinking water. Here residents live under the constant threat of eviction: they never know when they might suddenly have to move.

While it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how climate change will impact a city like Dhaka, without building urban resilience climate change will undoubtedly wreak havoc on those who already struggle to get by in the city.

When you have people living in such close proximity with poor sanitation and little access to health services, rising temperatures are only going to lead to a cesspool for diseases.

Research suggests this is particularly true for mosquito and tick-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue that already pose a major problem in Dhaka.

When you fill in the rivers surrounding your city, you remove a natural buffer so that when climate change does increase the amount of heavy rainfall in Dhaka, there will be nowhere for the water to drain to, and heavy flooding and water logging will continue to threaten those living in slums.

But as my grandmother has told me, in Chinese, the same word for crisis is opportunity and this is how we should view the challenge of adapting to climate change in the coming decades

If we make a concerted effort to include the poor and marginalized in our conversations, with particular consideration of land tenure; if we improve our zoning laws and improve sanitation and access to health services for all; and if we foster migration into other city centers in Bangladesh, then we will not only have built urban resilience, but also transformed the city into something better.

A lot has changed since my grandmother moved to the northern part of Dhaka. The city she remembers back then is not the city that exists today. I can only hope that in 60 years from now, Dhaka will also be unrecognizable. A city that is both resilient to the impacts of climate change, but also one that meets the needs of all of its people. A city all the residents of Dhaka can be proud to call home.


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