Climate change is heard so frequently now that people are just sidestepping the topic. What is a climate change then? I rather briefly inform you the causes without giving you a literal meaning of it. The rising of sea levels, shrinking mountain glaciers, accelerating ice melt in Greenland, Antarctica and the Artic, and shifts in flower/plant blooming times. These are all effects of climate change, according to NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration).
I am from Bangladesh, a south Asian country with a population of over 165 million. A land of 57K square miles and densely populated if equated to the land area of the whole country itself. According to NYTimes, out of many places, Bangladesh is at the top of everybody’s list of being at risk from rising sea levels. As we know, sea level rising is an effect of climate change. Many islands in the country are sinking in the Bay of Bengals, Indian Ocean due to rising of the sea level. When I lived there, I saw agricultural lands and nearby houses where people lived that were now under water. This mostly affected the poor. I am from the city, where the land at a higher elevation as compared to villages but in the last few years when I visited Bangladesh, I’ve seen people using boats to travel on what used to be streets used by vehicles; this is due to floods caused by sea level rising in the monsoon season.
What is Bangladesh doing about the climate change? Bangladesh has signed an agreement with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) known as the Paris Agreement, which states, “The Agreement aims to respond to the global climate change threat by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”2
Bangladesh signing the Paris agreement is not enough. The developed countries need to step up. Out of all the developed countries, United States is one of the top but the U.S. is trying to undo the policies under Trump’s administration according to NYTimes. This decision of U.S. can be very hurtful to this Earth. Time is running out and people need to act fast!
