| Bangladesh is a delta plain covered by a vast network of three hundred watercourses. From June to September, heavy monsoon rains cause the rivers to overflow their banks and flood nearly half of the country. Accustomed to this natural cycle, part of the country’s population lives permanently on « chars », small ephemeral river islands made of sand and silt deposited by the rivers. In 1998, however, two-thirds of the country remained under water for several months following the worst flood of the 20th century, which claimed 1.300 lives and left 31 million Bangladeshis homeless. Because of global warming, natural disasters of this kind are becoming increasingly common, and six years later Bangladesh was once again hit by devastating floods. It is one of the most heavily populated countries on Earth, and also one of the poorest and the most vulnerable to climate change. In the next decades, millions of Bangladeshis may be forced to leave their homes because of the gradual disappearance of the land under rising waters. In 2010, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), over 38 million people were displaced due to global warming related environmental disasters. This same year, 15 million Chinese and 11 million Pakistanis were forced to leave their homes because of extreme floods.
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