Bangladesh - 300 Dead In 2010 Storm, 150,000 Displaced, SW Coastal Zone Poisoned By Salt - AFP

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The terrible human cost of cyclones and flooding are plain to see in southwest Bangladesh, a low-lying, impoverished region on the frontline of the battle to adapt to climate change. Cyclone Aila, which hit in May last year, killed 300 people, washed away the embankments which make coastal regions habitable, and left 150,000 survivors reliant on emergency relief supplies including free rice.

Aila was particularly destructive as a huge volume of water, swollen by spring tides, slammed into a densely populated, extremely poor area, said Saleemul Huq of the International Institute for Environment and Development.

"Bangladesh is often said to be on the 'frontline' of adverse climate change impacts due to this combination of a large, dense and poor population with potentially severe changes as well as sea level rises," Huq said. "Such severe storms are likely to become more frequent in future," he told AFP, adding that sea level rises mean cyclones and tidal surges will become more devastating.

Such dire warnings explain why, as the UN's talks on climate change begin in Mexico, people in Bangladesh are less interested in the endless debates than in getting money to help communities prepare for increasingly extreme weather. "Even 18 months after Cyclone Aila struck, it remains a wasteland -- 90 percent of the trees are dead and the birds are still not singing," Koyra district chief Abul Bashar told AFP. "I have 150,000 people living on government handouts, they cannot farm as their lands were flooded with salt water," he said, adding that the area was also hit by major flooding in 2004 and 2007.

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