Pirate's Cove

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With climate change driving child marriage risks, Bangladesh fights back

Climate change-driven extreme weather – from flooding and mudslides to blistering heat – is accelerating migration to Bangladesh’s cities, raising the risks of problems such as child marriage, according to UNICEF’s head of Bangladesh programmes.

“In Bangladesh, climate change is in your face. You can’t avoid it. You can see it happening,” said Sheema Sen Gupta in an interview in London with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Every year you have cyclones, floods, landslides. It’s a given. It’s now part of everyday living, and the clearest thing you see (from it) is rural to urban migration.”

But surging migration to cities by rural families no longer able to make a living from farming or fishing brings other threats, from worsening urban overcrowding to child marriage, as families seek to keep girls “safe” in a new environments.

“I hesitate to say climate change and urbanisation are the major causes of child marriage. But they do compound it and make it a bit more difficult to intervene,” said Sen Gupta, who has been in Bangladesh for seven months and previously worked for UNICEF in India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Ghana and Somalia.

Or, it could be that Bangladesh is a 3rd World Shithole developing nation with the 4th largest population of Muslims in the world, with an ever growing percentage of those who are radicalized and approve and even push child marriage. And, even beyond that, developing nations tend to have a much higher percentage of marrying young. Like below the age of 18 young.

But, for all the blamestorming, the number of child marriages is down, due to several initiatives, including a law which bans girls being married under the age of 18.

But, hey, let’s blame ‘climate change’, because why not.