Episode 11 Leaving No One Behind

The oceans are rising.

And few countries are more vulnerable than Bangladesh.

Most of the land is less than 10 meters above sea level.

Fourteen-year-old Badhon lives on a shrinking island.

The village where he was born has already been claimed by the ocean.

Storms, heavy rains and floods
took everything away.

My classmates kept at their studies,
but my father can no longer send me to school.

The scars of climate change are everywhere.

The ocean has wrought immeasurable hardship on the locals.

And it's not their doing.

Badhon is learning to fish.

He has no choice.

His future is at the mercy of people in faraway lands.

Those who live in countries that grow rich on the back of carbon emissions.

I really want to study,
but my father can't afford it.

If I could continue my studies, I'd be able to
get a good job and build a house somewhere.

Global leaders often discuss climate change.

They met in Glasgow last November.

- What do we want?
- Climate Justice!

- When do we want it?
- Now!

- What do we want?
- Climate Justice!

- When do we want it?
- Now!

But the huge crowds outside want more than words.

They speak up for Badhon and the many others like him.

They say it's time to correct the wrongs inflicted on the MAPA - the most affected people and areas.

Here we are, and this is going to be focused on our most affected peoples and areas.

They're the ones we need to listen to the climate crisis.

In Latin America, we are already suffering the consequences of the climate crisis.

The United Nations says about 40 percent of the global population is extremely vulnerable to the risks of climate change.

It's time for solutions.

Solutions that ensure no one is left behind.

Hello there and welcome to Zeroing In: Carbon Neutral 2050.

I'm Catherine Kobayashi in New York.

You may have heard the saying: "A problem shared is a problem halved."

A nice idea - but wide of the mark on climate change because people like Badhon Dash bear the brunt of this crisis far more than others.

The host of the talk show "Climate One," Greg Dalton is here to tell us what's going wrong, and how we can put it right.

Greg, great to have you with us again.

Good to be with you, Catherine.

People most impacted by the climate crisis have been greatly affected.

What are the fundamental issues here?

Well, it's really about equity and justice.

You have the people who've contributed least to the problem are suffering first and worse.

So like COVID has shown us the more people who are vaccinated, the more we're protected, all protected.

And climate change - we're all connected together by the use of fossil fuels and is raising some real moral and ethical questions

if we can move beyond "me here now" to think more collectively.

Let's take a look at some data from Oxfam.

It shows the richest 10% of the global population account for half of all carbon emissions.

In short, so few of us are doing harm to so many.

Greg, can you give us a clearer picture of how the carbon emissions of the haves are affecting the have nots?

Yeah, the data is quite striking on the haves affecting the have nots.

The World Meteorological Organization did a study that showed over the last 50 years, there's been something like 11,000 reported disasters attributed to climate change fueled by fossil fuels

that caused two million deaths and over three and a half trillion dollars in damages.

That's a lot. And 90% of those deaths are in the developing world.

So the haves - our lifestyles are literally killing people in the developing world.

And you'd be hard pressed to find a more battered country than Bangladesh where more than four million people have been internally displaced as climate migrants.

The World Bank says by 2050 the figure will top 19 million.

We've actually been following Badhon's family for years.

In under a decade they'd been robbed of all they had.

100,000 people live here on the island of Kutubdia in the Bay of Bengal, southern Bangladesh.

But it's shrinking fast.

Some estimates say it will be gone in another 50 years due to rising sea levels.

This ocean will take all this away.

Over there...

There used to be a village,
but it's gone now.

Badhon's family used to call that village home.

This is his mother, Anjali, when we first met in 2014.

My house was here.
There was a pond and a tree.

But it was swept away by a cyclone.
There's nothing left for us here.

Look.
Only the tree stump remains.

The family built a house nearby.

But just two months later, it too was damaged by waves during a storm.

They had no choice but to rebuild on an embankment.

Anjali and her husband have three children.

Badhon is the eldest. He was six in 2014.

Back then, the pounding waves from rising tides would terrify them at night.

The water slammed against our house.
"Bang. Bang."

My children would cry.
And I'd hold them, like this.

The people of Kutubdia don't have the time or money to keep up with the pace of climate change.

Five years later, in 2019...

That house is also gone,
and we moved further inland.

Anjali's house on the embankment was destroyed by waves.

She moved again, this time to a distant relative's house one kilometer inland.

She rents a small room, and lives there with Badhon.

Her two younger children went to live with other relatives.

What will you do if there are more disasters?

If I had money, I would
build a house in another country.

But there's nothing I can do.

We visit Anjali and her family again in June.

They are still living in the same rented room.

Her life is only getting harder.

These past eight years have been brutal.

Anjali's husband, Dulu, is in debt.

And like the island they call home, their income is shrinking.

To make matters worse, Dulu is catching fewer fish.

The government sets moratoriums to protect resources.

The locals mend their gear in the hope of seizing the moment when it comes.

Dulu has been fishing for 35 years.

Badhon will soon join him.

Father and son, trapped in an increasingly perilous line of work, with diminishing returns.

Out in the sea we get hit by waves, cyclones,
storms and more.

This is very difficult.
He won't be able to handle it.

I don't want my boy to go through what I do.
I want him to get an education.

It's all an immense source of worry for Anjali.

Last spring, Badhon was on board a boat that sank in a storm.

He was rescued by another crew.

He told me he's not ready to go out to sea.
He pleaded with me not to make him go.

He said: The ocean is not a good place.
I need to protect my heart.

I can't send him to school or out on the waves.
Our life is so hard.

For now, Badhon has no other option.

Anjali can't afford to leave the island.

So they live hand to mouth.

I have no idea what my son's fate is.

If he wants to work in Saudi Arabia or Dubai,
I want that too.

I'd be happy if he gets a better job.

I can't make a living someplace else.

This island is all I know.

So I stay, despite the pain.
And somehow, I get by.

We won't budge for any downpour,
storm or flood.

Not all residents stay on the island.

Tens of thousands have left over the past 20 years.

Many head to Bangladesh's second-largest city, Chattogram.

But they live in slums along the coast.

They've gone from hardship at home, to hardship in the metropolis.

A day's work pays very little.

This is Bangladesh, a country woefully vulnerable to climate change.

The specter of rising water is no different in the city.

If only I could build a house.
If only God gave us a future.

That's all we want. Nothing more.

We've struggled so much because
we don't have a home.

And we continue to suffer.

June brought torrential downpours.

And Chattogram suffered massive flooding.

Climate migrants are forced to move just a few meters away, or to a different part of the country.

Either way, the rising waters are impossible to escape.

Greg, those images were just so hard to watch.

The people who contribute the least to the climate crisis are affected the most.

Yeah, that is really hard to watch to see both people on the seashore, there's home disappears, people in the cities being affected,

and to see kind of the hopelessness of that young man, you know, it's our lifestyles are contributing to that,

you know, climate change didn't cause the poverty, it is making it worse.

We need to have solutions, we need to have some green growth and lift up those people in those economies without increasing carbon emissions at the same time.

And even in some of the most developed parts of our world, it's getting harder to protect people from the effects of climate change.

Take New York where last September, the remnants of Hurricane Ida lashed the city with unprecedented rainfall.

13 people died.

And media reports say most were low income immigrants living below ground.

Greg, what can you tell us about the global climate risk map we're seeing now?

It shows a relative climate risk around the world from 1999 to 2018.

The darker the red, the higher the ranking, exposure to extreme floods, fires, storms, that sort of thing. Extreme heat.

US ranked 27th out of 181 countries, Japan was 62nd.

And Japan is no stranger to extreme weather, heat waves, typhoons and downpours are common but they seem to grow fiercer by the year oftentimes they leave the vulnerable tragically exposed.

In 2017, the people of Asakura in southwestern Japan were hit by unprecedented rainfall.

The disaster took 33 lives.

Downpours like that were said to occur once every 500 years or so.

But the community was pummeled again for the next three years.

Many moved to this public housing facility.

More than 70% of the occupants who lost their homes to the disaster are 65 or older.

I'm not going back.

This is global warming. There's no telling
when another disaster will hit. It's scary.

Authorities are spending vast sums of money to expand the width of the local river and build dams to contain mudslides.

A city official says many of the elderly want to go home, but can't.

Some don't have the funds.

Others have lost their land, or their farms were destroyed.

Ide Asako has decided to spend the rest of her life in public housing.

But the 86-year-old is lonely, and misses her beloved neighbors.

I have nothing now. No farm, either.

I while away the days in my room.
I wish I could be more energetic...

The city runs a series of programs to foster a sense of community and help the elderly stay healthy.

But officials fear their work is merely a stop-gap.

Japan's population is aging fast.

And the land ministry says the risk of flooding could double if the pace of global warming isn't slowed.

We don't have a quick fix for this.
Frankly, we don't have any concrete measures.

We will do our best to listen to the
affected people, including the elderly.

And try to support them as best we can.

The local government considers more than 90 percent of affected households as "rebuilt" because they've either built a new house or live in public housing.

But the fact remains: about a third have not managed to return to their hometowns.

In one district of Asakura, the population shrunk by 40 percent after the disaster.

Two communities have disappeared altogether.

Nagata Shigemitsu has worked as a community leader to give the people some stability ever since the disaster.

But he says many of the elderly exist in limbo - torn between their old lives, and their new reality.

Reconstruction is slow going.

City officials say it's complete.
But for us, far from it.

We don't even have homes like before.

How are we supposed to believe
everything is back to normal?

Greg, Japan's Meteorological Agency says severe downpours could more than double in frequency if we don't reduce our carbon emissions now.

So people in communities like we've just seen, could they soon be in a perpetual cycle of disaster and recovery?

Many communities could be in that cycle.

Climate change is accelerating and the effects are compounding, so the hits keep coming and that can really challenge our ability,

even wealthy countries to respond to the next disaster they've been got to know the last one.

Yes. And here in the United States, researchers at the Environmental Protection Agency are suggesting that some of the most vulnerable people come from racial and ethnic minority groups.

Greg, what does this analysis tell us?

Well, we know that fossil fuel facilities are located disproportionately in low income, communities of color.

And so the impacts of burning fossil fuels also disproportionately hurt people of color and low income communities.

Black Americans are 40% more likely to live in an area that currently that's projected to have extreme temperature related to climate change.

These problems, of course need effective solutions and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says we need to try harder.

The report suggests some of us are even creating MAPA in our efforts to tackle climate change.

It's called "maladaptation."

So Greg, have you seen any examples of that?

Well, one example is of a seawall that can kind of protect one area from rising seas and push that damage that energy from the oceans waves to somewhere else.

So it can help one area make it worse somewhere else.

Sometimes, the solutions actually can make the problem worse.

For example, cement can often diminish biodiversity, so we got to be careful about what we're doing.

So what's the key to finding solutions that actually work?

Well, it's listening to communities, thinking long term, and often leaders saying things that people they don't want to hear.

We need to change. You can't have what you had yesterday.

That's really hard to do.

Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope for the MAPA.

Our partner is at Northern California Public Media recently visited a community under threat from wildfires near Silicon Valley.

And in Bangladesh, a project is changing the lives of internally displaced migrants, what you're about to see proves success lies in not only finding ways to adapt,

but also listening to the voices of the most vulnerable.

In Menlo Park, most residents are people of color.

Development projects have not reached the area, and many of the homes are precariously old.

Wildfires and heatwaves are becoming more frequent, and more destructive.

Karen Williams started thinking her house was no longer safe for her and her 107-year-old mother.

When it's hot, when it's smoky, like last year when there was all that smoke?

How does the house do?

I go to the department store because they got air conditioning.

Yeah. And but it's very uncomfortable, and it was uncomfortable for my mother.

A local NGO called Climate Resilient Communities stepped in to make their home more resilient to climate change.

Solar panels were installed at no cost.

My bill was 149 to 150, 160.

Now, my bill is 69, 65, so it's beautiful.

You know, is climate change, you know, important to you?

They will say no because usually the response to that is low because people don't really connect climate change to all those things.

But when you talk about something else, that impacts them.

So things like in extreme heat, those things are ranked very high as concerns to that.

So that's where you find the opportunity to connect the dots.

The NGO regularly holds workshops to introduce residents to public and private home improvement and weatherization programs.

It's all about listening to the locals.

Community voices are part of a requirement for a project.

Because if we don't get their support and buy in, when we are making decisions around adaptation or decisions around climate change,

then all the effort will be amiss.

And in Bangladesh, many people from the southern delta region have high hopes of embarking on new lives in the port of Mongla.

It was once extremely prone to floods.

But in just over a decade, the population has tripled to about 150,000.

Climate migrants in Bangladesh could number almost 20 million by 2050.

Authorities are making arrangements to accept people in Mongla.

The focus is on modern anti-flood measures, including an 11-kilometer embankment, two flood-prevention gates and reservoirs.

They are also taking advantage of Mongla's proximity to the ocean.

The government has designated the area as an Export Processing Zone, or EPZ.

Factories, and jobs, have sprung up thanks to foreign investment.

Reshma Begum started a new life in Mongla after a river swallowed her home elsewhere.

At first, she was at a loss about how she would provide for her family of three.

But she works at a factory now.

The EPZ benefitted us a lot.
That's the fact.

It is helping us with our debts and
responsibilities.

The innovative work in Mongla is headed by Bangladeshi scientist Saleemul Huq of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development.

The most important element is involving the people, the citizens of Mongla, the ones who live there, the incoming migrants, and enabling them to decide what is best for them

and supporting them to then implement what they decide is best for them.

So it is what we call locally led adaptation to climate change.

Professor Huq is optimistic.

With more towns like Mongla, he says up to one million climate migrants could be provided with new homes and a livelihood over the next decade.

Greg, it's so inspiring to see everyone around the world come together for positive change.

You know that water in Mongla isn't so much of a threat now, but an asset.

There plenty of lessons here. What are the main takeaways?

It was exciting to see a homeowner put solar on her roof and see her cost go down to see a solutions available and economic today, and that reduces emissions for everyone.

It was also heartening to see climate migrants going into a city and have dignity in a job available and accessible to them.

As experts say there's about 100 million climate migrants today in this world.

They are people displaced.

Many of them are going to cities and they don't have a job or dignity waiting for them.

So that was encouraging.

Surely the best way forward is to make sure no one is left behind.

Right, and have an economy that's less extractive more inclusive, to build up regional economies and give everyone a path forward in this climate world we're living in.

Greg, thank you so much for your insight.

Always great, Catherine.

And thank you for watching.

We'll leave you with a few words of wisdom from Professor Huq.

He's been helping people adapt to our changing world for over three decades.

See you again soon.

We have all agreed to do things, but we are not doing them fast enough.

So we have to accelerate.

We have to do more. We have to do it faster.

And in my view, the most important people that now need to be engaged are young people all over the world.

Because the old people who are our leaders have failed us.

They have said the right things, but they have not done what they said they would do.

So we need to get the young people to move forward.

My faith lies with the young people.