By Laurie Goering
DHAKA, April 26 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – On the streets of this South Asian mega-city, jammed solid with rickshaws, honking taxi vans, cars, bicycles, sweating pedestrians and lumbering buses with their paint scraped off in tight squeezes, getting anywhere quickly by road is impossible.
The 100-metre drive from the airport parking lot to the first intersection can take half an hour. Getting right across town requires many hours. That’s what keeps Sirajul Islam, chief urban planner for Dhaka South City Corporation, awake at night.
“Traffic,” he sighed, asked about his main concerns for the fast-growing city. “Though of course there are so many worries.”
Bangladesh’s capital city of 20 million people is growing by close to 5 percent a year, in part as rural families migrate to the city seeking work or having lost their homes to worsening river erosion and storm surges that flood fields with salt water.
The stream of migrants, expected to surge as climate change problems like sea-level rise intensify, could double the already crowded city’s population in 15 years, said Omar Rahman, vice chancellor of Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB).
“We are in the eye of the storm here,” he told participants at a conference on community-based adaptation to climate change in Dhaka this week.
