The people of Gabura in Bangladesh are having everything that’s most threatening about climate change thrown at them.
Storms keep wrecking their coastal defences, and rising sea levels are pushing salty seawater into their wells and fields.
And the story of one woman, Shorbanu Khatun, represents all that’s proved least effective about international efforts to tackle climate change so far.
To highlight the plight of the village – and the needs of all developing countries suffering from climate change – Oxfam offered Shorbanu the chance to make her case on a global stage.
So what does this mean for Shorbanu and the people of Gabura?
A trickle of aid has reached them, but not remotely on the scale promised in Copenhagen, and much of the assistance that has got through was raised within Bangladesh.
But all the time the rise of the sea, millimetre by millimetre, fuelled by the melting of the distant polar ice, contaminates local wells and keeps reducing supplies of drinking water.
“There is water everywhere around us,” Shorbanu says, “but it doesn’t have any use. We have a serious crisis.”
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https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59114449