In Bangladesh, things are hotting up
Here is a striking comparison to mull over. Divide Australia's population across all the land in the country and you're left with about three people for each square kilometre - in theory, plenty of room to fulfil that great Australian dream of owning a quarter-acre block
Daniel Flitton | The Age | March 6, 2010
Now contrast Australia with the population density of Bangladesh, where for every square kilometre of land, roughly 1140 people need to make a home.
Two very different countries, not only in population but in geography too. Barely 6 per cent of Australia is arable, whereas in Bangladesh, farmland makes up more than half the country. Australia is rich, Bangladesh disastrously poor.
Keep this comparison in mind for a moment and consider how the global warming debate is unfolding here.
There is no doubt that views about climate change in Australia have shifted. Gone is the harried push of last year for an urgent response, replaced by much greater scepticism about the scale of the problem and calls for dramatic action.
Blame the failure on the inconclusive Copenhagen conference, exposures of shoddy practices in some of the scientific research, or a general realisation in the community that tackling the problem will mean an economic cost - the ''great big tax on everything'' line from Tony Abbott. All these reasons combined have taken the sting out of the climate change issue.
This is a good debate. Science must be questioned. The emissions trading system should be scrutinised and alternatives considered. Of course, the international context is extremely important.
This issue is on the back-burner for a time as the government decides where to next.
Now, consider what Nobel peace prize-winner Muhammad Yunus has to say about the problem facing his country: ''If you live in a country like Bangladesh, you can't stay away from the issue for very long because we are the front-line country for the global warming issue … we can see it in an everyday way,'' he told me last week as he prepared to visit this country.
His is a flat country, with about 20 per cent of the land less than a metre above sea level. What this means in practical terms is that people in Bangladesh are at much greater risk from even small changes in the environment than we are in Australia.
Now, before sceptics leap on the obvious, that Yunus is a development banker and not a climate scientist, let's acknowledge that fact. But Yunus is an influential voice and he comes from a country of more than 155 million people; he deserves to be taken seriously.
His plea is simply for common sense. ''It's not difficult,'' he says, ''all we're saying is that we will hand over a safer climate to our children, not the way we are doing it now and making it more dangerous.''
This is where the great global debate on climate change has stalled - trapped between the experience of countries such as Australia and Bangladesh.
On one side, the issue is treated as a political abstraction, a concern for the future. Certainly, it might turn out that it would have been better to act sooner rather than later. But as a rich country, Australia will cope with the environmental changes, whether these turn out to be the worst-case predictions or minimal. Our capacity to throw money at this problem is limited only by how seriously we regard it.
But Bangladesh will struggle to manage climate change no matter how small the impact. The glaciers in the Himalayas might not be melting as predicted, but the vast majority of scientific evidence still points to gradual environmental change.
As in many developing countries, environmental stress will compound problems that are already present in Bangladesh - poor water management, bad urban planning, political corruption, chronic poverty. The experience of even small-scale environmental change will be that much worse.
What is too often overlooked, amid the controversy about global warming science, is that these governance problems can actually be fixed. Not overnight, but if wealthy nations are looking for practical measures to limit the impact of global warming, helping the quality of government in countries such as Bangladesh would be a good start.
Self-interest should drive this policy. For one thing, the displacement of people from Bangladesh need not number in the millions to worry Australian policy-makers. A few years back, a handful of Rohingya refugees from the south of the country made their way - via Malaysia - to Indonesia, planning to catch a boat to Australia. Those vast open spaces must seem very attractive when the crowd presses in.
But more than that, Australia has a chance to make money with environmental technology in Bangladesh. Yunus, who won a Nobel prize for setting up micro-finance bank Grameen and doling out millions of dollars in tiny loans to the poor, has a new big idea. He is urging the business community to hunt out opportunities to turn a modest profit and tackle pressing social problems at the same time. Rather than relying on government to fix the world's ills, he's betting on the marketplace.
A market-mechanism to combat global warming - now there's a good idea.
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