COPENHAGEN (AlertNet) Â? Shorbanu Khatun knows firsthand the disasters climate change can trigger.
Fifteen years ago, saltwater began infiltrating the soil where Khatun and her husband grew rice, vegetables and fruit trees in BangladeshÂ?s Sunderbans region, in the delta of the Ganges River.
As their crops died, KhatunÂ?s husband turned to collecting wild honey in the nearby mangrove forests to bring in money to feed his family, including their four children. But the mangroves are home to some of the last of BangladeshÂ?s Royal Bengal tigers, and attacks on people were frequent. One day, KhatunÂ?s husband didnÂ?t come home.
After her in-laws pushed Khatun and her children out of their home, the family moved into a mud hut on her parentsÂ? small property, and Khatun began taking odd jobs as a domestic, collecting firewood and fishing to get by.
Then, six months ago, Cyclone Aila swept in.
"It was a cloudy day. We were about to have lunch when suddenly the water started rising," she remembered. Her children climbed onto the tin roof of their hut and suddenly "we were floating," she said.
Knocked unconscious, she woke up two days later in a hospital and rushed home, only to find the remains of her hut submerged in shoulder-deep water and her terrified children living on a nearby river embankment. The family has been there ever since.
"We have lost everything," she told listeners at the Copenhagen climate meeting during an informal climate justice "hearing" presided over by Nobel Peace Prize winner and Archbishop Desmond Tutu and by Mary Robinson, IrelandÂ?s former president and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.
At TuesdayÂ?s hearing, the culmination of three dozen similar gatherings held around the world throughout 2009, Khatun and others hit by climate change told their stories and begged negotiators to take quick action to cut global emissions and to provide financial help to those most vulnerable to climate change.
"I want my life back," Khatun told listeners. Right now, "we donÂ?t know how to live our lives" anymore.
International negotiators in Copenhagen are struggling to reach a new agreement by Friday to curb emissions and help poorer nations adapt to the effects of climate change.
While a binding, formal agreement likely wonÂ?t be signed until next year, leaders do hope to agree on a political framework that would pave the way for an eventual agreement.
Tutu said such a deal is crucial for people "for whom the future is becoming a source of fear and uncertainty rather than hope."
"We are here to call for action," he said. "Those who run the gauntlet of the worst effects of climate change are those who didnÂ?t cause it."
Mary Robinson called the problem "a deep and global injustice" for the worldÂ?s poorest nations, who have contributed least to climate change but are suffering most of its early effects.
"Climate change is undermining human rights on an unprecedented scale," she said. And the poor "have the most to lose from the indecision and delay we have here in Copenhagen."
Climate-affected "witnesses" at the hearing, organised by Oxfam and other advocacy groups, spoke of dramatic changes to seasonal patterns that have made planting and harvesting difficult, growing deaths from diseases like malaria and cholera, worsening storms and fast alternating floods and droughts, particularly in Africa and southeast Asia.
Constance Okollet, who since 2007 has lost her belongs and crops to a series of floods and droughts in Uganda, said agriculture now was "a gamble" thanks to unpredictable weather.
"We want our seasons back," she said. If climate changes continues, "we are not (going to) see the next generation (survive)," she warned.
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