Climate of Change

About this programme by Peter Day

Bamboo is a big business in Bangladesh. A country where so much of the land is close to sea level or big rivers finds ways of coping with surges and floods ... and building on poles is one of the solutions.

As world leaders gather in Copenhagen to try to decide on measures to tackle the human causes of climate change, Bangladesh is of course an interesting case study.

It is a poor and crowded country with few resources apart from people power with which to tackle rising tides and increasing river flows caused by melting glaciers in the Himalayas.

During the global climate summit, developing countries will be making special pleas for financial and technical aid from the rich world to tackle the consequences of climate change, and I suspect they will also be trying to negotiate abstention from some of the more rigorous carbon reduction targets that others might be prepared to sign up for.

But this Global Business is not anything to do with the diplomatic bargaining over targets and carbon trading that may be taking place in Copenhagen.

Instead it is about the idea of sustainability as it applies to a developing country that has little but its ingenuity to live on, like those bamboo poles.

In the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka the other week I listened to Atiq Rahman explaining some of the practicalities of introducing techniques such as small solar power generators to individual unconnected rural homes, and floating gardens to enable agriculture to continue on land that is underwater.

He is the director of a 20-year-old think tank called the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies. It is deeply involved in these ideas.

Sustainable living for poor people is not something that gets a lot of attention when world politicians gather for events such as the Copenhagen summit, but it sets you thinking.

So when you listen to what has been decided (or not) in Copenhagen, remember the bamboo poles of Bangladesh. Many lives depend on them.