Climate Refugees

The 150 million people of Bangladesh are, for the most part, deeply impoverished. The average Bangladeshi has never owned a car or flown in an airplane. Many live in shacks that lack electricity. In short, they have made scant contribution to the veil of greenhouse gases now warming the earth. But Bangladesh’s citizens — packed into a country a little larger than Greece — will feel the effects of global warming and rising sea levels more acutely than almost any other people on earth. Much of the country is little more than an enormous river delta, with people eking out a living on land that is only a foot or two above sea level. Indeed, Bangladeshis are already learning what it is like to live with climate change as slowly rising sea levels contaminate drinking supplies with saltwater and destroy the mangrove swamps that act as a barrier to cyclones. Bangladeshi photographer Munem Wasif has documented the lives of his countrymen feeling the effects of rising sea levels and a recent cyclone. Click here for a sampling of his work, for which he was named a finalist in the Prix Pictet conservation photography awards.