Future of 19 million children in Bangladesh at risk: UNICEF

Devastating floods, cyclones and other environmental disasters linked to climate change are threatening the lives and future of more than 19 million children in Bangladesh, UNICEF said yesterday. In a new report, UNICEF says that while Bangladeshis have developed admirable powers of resilience, more resources and innovative programmes are urgently needed to avert the danger that climate change poses to the country’s youngest citizens.

“Climate change is deepening the environmental threat faced by families in Bangladesh’s poorest communities, leaving them unable to keep their children properly housed, fed, healthy and educated,” said UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore, who visited Bangladesh in early March 2019. “In Bangladesh and around the world, climate change has the potential to reverse many of the gains that countries have achieved in child survival and development,” she added.

The new UNICEF report, ‘A Gathering Storm: Climate change clouds the future of children in Bangladesh’, points out that Bangladesh’s flat topography, dense population and weak infrastructure make the country uniquely vulnerable to the powerful and unpredictable forces that climate change is compounding. The threat is felt from the flood and drought-prone lowlands in the country’s northern regions to its storm-ravaged coastline along the Bay of Bengal.

Drawing on interviews with families, community leaders and officials, UNICEF says that a combination of extreme weather events, such as flooding, storm surges, cyclones and droughts, and longer-term phenomena directly related to climate change, are forcing families deeper into poverty and displacement. In the process, children’s access to education and health services is severely being disrupted.

For More: http://www.theindependentbd.com/post/194649

Posted by admin on Apr 8 2019. Filed under Climate change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry