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We return now to the COP 26 climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland, where leaders are trying to reach new agreements and commitments toward reducing emissions and slowing the impacts of global warming. William Brangham is there for us all week. In his report tonight, he looks at key questions about getting enough help to the world's most vulnerable nations.
On the bustling streets of Dhaka, Mohammad Nirob is part of what's becoming the biggest migration inside Bangladesh. Seven years ago, the 45-year-old had to leave his wife and four kids behind in their village over 100 miles away to come here and earn money. Why? His prior life and livelihood had been washed away by ever-increasing floods, ones that are getting worse in a warming world.
I had run a business before. But the business is no more now.The shops, the houses have been devoured by the river. For more than half the year, our house was submerged two to three times a month. When the high tide happened and the river water flowed into our house, it restricted our movements, our lives. Climate refugees like Nirob are partly why Dhaka is one of the fastest growing cities in the world and why Bangladesh represents one of the great cruelties of climate change. Those that have done little to cause the problem are paying the biggest price. Bangladesh emits less than half of 1 percent of the global greenhouse gases that are warming the planet, but suffers disproportionately from that warming. This low-lying country has always been vulnerable to flooding, but climate change has intensified storms, pushed saltwater further inland and now driven an estimated 10 million people from their homes.
The 170 million people in my country are the most climate-aware people in the whole world. Saleemul Huq is the director of the International Center for Climate Change And Development at the Independent University of Bangladesh. He's in Glasgow for COP 26. He's been to every one of these summits. Does that explain all the gray hair on top of your head? Indeed.Indeed. The gray hair is one indicator. Huq says the people of his country are following the talks in Scotland closely. Poor people in the poor countries of the world feel the climate change problem is a problem of injustice. It's not about environment. It's not about politics. It's about rich people polluting the atmosphere and making victims of poor people, who did not pollute the atmosphere. And that's just wrong.It's immoral.
One reason for that inequality is the failures of the world's richest countries to fully deliver on a promised $100 billion a year starting in 2020 to help poorer countries adapt to climate change. While many argue that sum was far too little, the wealthier nations aren't even on track to hit that goal. In 2019, they provided about $80 billion, up only 2 percent from the year before. It's not a huge amount of money. The rich countries together could have figured out how to do it, how to provide it.They didn't. Each country decided for themselves, what is my fair share of this amount? And that's it. And the rest has to come from other people. So that, to me, is no way to run a show. You know, they were just not serious.
Speaking in Glasgow last week, America's climate envoy, John Kerry, said developed nations will hit the $100 billion mark next year, but, he added. No government in the world has enough money to effect this transition. The distribution of these funds has also been unequal. One analysis showed that, as of 2019, just 18 percent of the money in the Green Climate Fund, one of the ways these climate dollars get dispersed, went to the poorest nations. Over 60 percent went to middle-income countries, like India and Mexico.
I stand before you, fellow leaders of our nations, neither as a scientist, nor as an environmental expert, but as a citizen of our beautiful planet, and, more specifically, as an island boy facing reality. Frustrated and sometimes despairing voices from developing nations have been heard throughout COP 26. The Maldives is challenged in -- from every single corner, and it is happening, and it is happening now. Mohamed Nasheed is the former president of the Maldives, and now speaker of Parliament.
Twelve years ago, to protest the damage his low-lying country was experiencing, he famously staged a cabinet meeting underwater. His country has to spend half its national budget adapting to climate change. If the planet heats about 1.5 degrees, that's a death sentence on the people of the Maldives. The Maldives and many low-lying islands and many coastal areas will find it difficult to survive, and we will have large amounts of people on the move, many climate refugees. And I think the instability that would create would be far worse than addressing the issue right now.
