Picture gallery of Climate Change in Bangladesh Exhibition
Monday, 27 August 2007
The island of Aralia in the Haor flood plain of North East Bangladesh is just one of the country's thousands of silt islands.
The island is surrounded by water for six months of the year, which recedes for the other six, allowing villagers to grow crops on the surrounding land. It is very small - around six metres high, thirty metres wide and a little more than a kilometre long. A population of nearly four thousand live here.
According to its older residents, Aralia has diminished to a fifth of its size in the last thirty years. The island's farmers used to be able to predict something of the volatile weather patterns. But over the last twenty years flooding has become increasingly severe and erosion has continued at an alarming pace.
Many scientists, environmentalists and aid agencies like Concern, who work with Bangladesh's rural poor, believe that climate change is to blame for the dramatic increase in flooding and erosion. What is clear is that the people whose lives are most catastrophically affected are, inevitably, the poorest and most vulnerable.
