Reducing Climate Hazards of Sundarbans Community

From early June 2020, monsoon-related floods have devastated millions of people in low lying areas of Northern, north-eastern and south-eastern districts of Bangladesh. Mainly 80 percent of Bangladesh’s rain falls happens during monsoon season (June to October). Monsoon rains typically cause some level of flooding, but officials said this flooding may be the worst in a decade and the longest-lasting since 1988. “A third of Bangladesh is under water after some of the heaviest rains in a decade”, Flood Forecasting and Warning Centre (FFWC) official have said. The Disaster Management and Relief Ministry warned that 23 districts would be affected by the floods.

Till now around 161 people have lost their lives to the ongoing floods in Bangladesh, mostly from drowning, according to government data. Most of the flood affected areas people are severely lacking of pure drinking water, as most of the drinking water sources were drown into the flood water. Water-borne diseases like diarrhoea, skin-disease, eye-inflammation, bronchitis have affected nearly 28,000 people in the flood-hit areas. They include more than 10,000 diarrhoea patients.

Many flood protections structures, such as embankments and dykes, were already damaged from monsoon floods in recent years; the typical recovery cycle is usually three to five years. The country is also recovering from Cyclone Amphan, which hit the country’s coast in May 2020. And the COVID-19 pandemic has constrained response efforts. In addition, this recent flood would be devastating for the people of Bangladesh.

In this hard time of people, we would like to be with them with little support from our side. Bangladesh Environment and Development Society (BEDS) is a nonprofit, non-political community-based development organization which has been working since 2010 to promote ecological balance and create harmony between human and nature. Disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation is one of the main thematic areas of BEDS. So, in this hard time, we want to provide assistance to vulnerable families in flooded parts of Bangladesh who have lost their homes or livelihoods with global communities’ donation as BEDS fully depends on the foreign funding and donation for its development activities.

Recently BEDS is trying to raise fund through GlobalGiving platform for a project entitled “Reducing Disaster Risks of the Sundarbans Coastal People”. We want to help the flood affected people under this project. Total budget size of the project is 50,000 USD. We would like to raise all of the project fund by 2020.

So, our heartfelt request to all global communities to stand with the Bangladeshi flood affected people in this hard time. We believe that it is very necessary to work together in this cataclysmic situation, so that we could end the enduring of thousands of flood affected families.