'Climate change is creating new forms of injustice'.

Byline: Peerzada Salman

KARACHI -- The Climate Change and Urban Violence Global Engagement Network (CCUVN) at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) organised a three-day online workshop on 'Climate change, cities and violence in the time of Covid-19: perspectives from South Asia' from Wednesday evening.

Dr Farhana Sultana of Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, USA, was the first speaker of the event. She talked about a research project in Bangladesh which has often been identified as one of the countries that are most vulnerable to climate change. The country is situated at the confluence of some of the largest rivers in the world, with the monsoons and poverty as multiple overlapping problems. One of the things happening in the deltaic city of Dhaka is that because of its location it faces water-related issues.

'Climate change is ultimately about water,' said Dr Sultana. 'It gets heightened in Dhaka in terms of lack of planning, and this vulnerability that existed in urban spaces is coming to the fore. If there's flooding from monsoons, it creates problems where space lacks infrastructure. This leads to waterlogging. Flooding becomes one of the ways impacting climate change. As a result, climate apartheid is being observed in the city. The middle class is poor. Their spaces lack sanitation and water supplies.

The rise of temperature also causes heat stress for the population, many of whom don't have electricity, no proper ventilation etc. These marginalised spaces face different kinds of challenges - so urban spaces in Dhaka are fractured by class and spatiality.'

Experts discuss challenges climate change poses to urban environments in online workshop

She said within all of that, there is multiple intersectionality by gender. Poor women who live in settlements, even those who live in households, face effects of climate change. Gender inequities have exacerbated the problems, further aggravated by the Covid-19 epidemic. 'You can't wash hands unless you have water. There's heightened need for water in homes and women are largely responsible for managing water at homes.' It's a dual whammy of climate change and coronavirus. Climate change is already creating new forms of injustices. It's not a single issue topic. There's no easy solution. What's imperative is that we must first understand that it exists and investigate the inter-linkages and how they operate in marginalised spaces.

Dr Nichola Khan...