In Bangladesh, fires are a constant threat and often end tragically for those affected. Crying family members in front of burning factory buildings, anxiously waiting to know more about the fate of their loved ones, has become a common sight. Urban slums going up in flames are news seen far too often. Tens of thousands of people fall victim to these fires every year, losing their homes, all their belongings, and all too often their lives, their parents, their children, and their siblings. The number of fire incidents in Bangladesh has tripled over the past two decades. The main reasons include rapid and unplanned urbanization, population density and unsafe house construction, and the increasing use of technology without the necessary knowledge of its usage. Beyond that, for decades fires have been the number one cause of loss of life in the country’s factories. In 2020, the country recorded 383 industrial fires out of which 273 occurred in garment factories. The regular outbreaks of factory fires reveal the often-inadequate fire safety measures and poor working conditions for workers. They also shed light on the lack of monitoring and law enforcement by responsible authorities. Those who suffer most are the factory workers and their families. In the rarest of cases, they have a choice or an alternative to secure their livelihoods. Besides performing hard work in an environment that involves great risk, their low income oftentimes does not allow them to live in safe homes either. It is the sad truth that economically disadvantaged people face countless risks every day, and little support in guarding their lives. And far too often, their lives, their hopes, and their dreams dissolve into ashes.

"This building will stand a hundred years," owner boasted just a day before the collapse. The next morning, it came down."Aha re," the people shook their heads and asked sympathetically So sad."Shoitaner shoitan," they cursed the owner of the building. The devil's devil. The number of dead bodies crossed thousand so fast. Thousands of mourners have gathered at the ruins of a garment factory building (Rana Plaza at Savar) to offer prayers for the souls of the 1,134 people who died in the structure's collapse 24th April, the worst tragedy in the history of the global garment industry. It came months after a fire at another garment factory in Bangladesh in November killed 112 workers. These two are mentionable, the time before also a couple of accidents happened and many lost their close ones in those tragedies. Savar tragedy is a symbol of our failure as a nation. The crack in Rana Plaza that caused the collapse of the building has only shown us that if we don't face up to the cracks in our state systems, that we as a nation will get lost in the debris of the collapse. Bangladesh’s government also agreed to allow garment workers to form unions without permission from factory owners. That decision came a day after it announced a plan to raise the minimum wage in the industry. Many Western companies that have activities in Bangladesh have engaged in significant public relations campaigns to minimize the fallout from revelations about their worker's inhumane conditions. Dozens of consumers in the US spoke out against unsafe working conditions found in the factory building. People also unleashed their anger at retailers that did not have any connections to that specific building, but are known to source from factories located in Bangladesh. Cheap labors, the number of laborers are blessings for our garment sector. But this blessing turned into a curse when all those innocent workers have to sacrifice their lives under poor labors law, unhealthy security system, negligence of their owner. Moreover, the government itself. The "Made in Bangladesh" tag has now changed in meaning. It costs blood to tag a price on those products made by our workers. It is high time authority took any revolutionary step for the sake of the neglected garment workers. Thousands of garment workers had died. The last breath of those souls surrounds us. Did we learn anything at all from these terrible massacres? Or will we have completed our duty by merely expressing our deep sympathy?

"It’s painful; walking for three consecutive day without food and water but its more heart wrenching when I think of my home, my belongings leaving behind."- Gulping a mug of water, an old Rohingya woman fled from Myanmar, was stating out her agony after reaching Lomba bill-Teknaf-Bangladesh. She is not the only one fled from there. Tens of thousands of Rohingya people had and still have making their way to Bangladesh because of the brutal situation in Myanmar. “Rohingya” The word itself is a taboo in Myanmar. The country leaders also do not use and some asked the international community not to use it. Buddhist leaders instead refer to Rohingya as “Bengali” to root out as immigrants and foreigners from Bangladesh. They are not included among the 135 ethnic minorities officially recognized by the state. Many reports on Rohingya persecution and marginalization begin with Myanmar’s 1982 citizenship law, which stripped the country’s 1 million Rohingya of citizenship, leaving them without access to health care or education. Waves of violence soon followed. The military calls the campaign a clearance operation against an insurgent terrorist military group. They claim the crackdown is in response to a series of armed attacks on border police by Rohingya militants on August 25 that left 12 officers dead, the second such type of attacks in the past 12 months. Following the incident, Myanmar authorities have reportedly cracked down on the Rohingya community, which the United Nations believes may amount to ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority group. Observers say that though armed Rohingya insurgents exist, their overall numbers are small, and they are poorly equipped. And the crackdown has affected the entire ethnic group. In what, it has quickly disintegrated into a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions, a staggering 5lacs Rohingya Muslims have fled from Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state to Bangladesh over the weeks. At least 3.4lacs of them are children. Hearing really dreadful stories of people from enormous number of very young, and very traumatized Rohingya refugees who have survived somehow. Among those fleeing Myanmar, are many pregnant women who have been walking for three, four, or even five days to find safety. Many bringing stories of systematic rape, murder and arson at the hands of Myanmar soldiers. Entire villages have been burnt to the ground. Rohingya refugees report that soldiers shot at them as they fled. The Rohingya, a Muslim minority, do not qualify for Myanmar citizenship even though many have lived there for generations. The army insists they are interlopers from across the border in Bangladesh. But Rohingyas are saying they have lived there for generations after generations and they never ever were in Bangladesh. They surely are not the people from No Man's Land. Then who are they? What is their existence?

Approximately the lives of 19.4 million Bangladeshi children are affected in different ways already by consequences of short- or longer-term climate change. A changing climate is already now undermining their lives and diminishing their prospects for a better future. Twenty of Bangladesh’s 64 Districts are exposed to the highest risk from unpredictable forces of climate change-related disasters that strike with frightening frequency. Millions of Bangladeshi live in coastal areas. Countless families and their children fall victim to flash floods, powerful cyclones, and many others lose their roots by the river erosion. Their farmland remains infertile, or farming communities suffer increasing periods of drought. Many families end up as migrants. Many families who have nothing but some plastic bags with a few belongings search for a better life escape to Dhaka. At the highest risk are children from families whose lives are already shaped by poverty and inequality. These families are rarely able to provide their children with necessities like protection, nutritious food, clean water, and primary education. Millions of children become adrift in city slums, with compromised health and destroyed educational prospects. Their families are forced to send their children to work, and so millions of children find themselves trapped in exploitive work – all due to the inescapable impact of climate change. “Angles with broken wings” gives voice to an estimated 3.45 million Bangladeshi children who lost their childhood. Child labor in the bustling shipyards became, for example, their sharp reality. Their families have no choice. The whole family is under pressure to find income to cover their rent and all other costs. Almost 30 bustling shipyards occupy parts of Old Dhaka's Keraniganj riverfront, where a little number of ships are built. But many launches and steamers of various sizes and shapes are repaired round the clock. About 10,000 workers, who work in these dockyards, earn not more than 1 USD per day. In the frequently sound of hammering echoes, laborers scrape rust and layers of old paint from the hulls of battered cargo ships hauled up on the dockside. It’s a constant work with flame and dust. Without goggles, they are risking serious injury or blindness, they all climb tall rope ladders to the ships' highest points to retrieve items, risking death if they slip. Too many Bangladeshi children work without any protective equipment - without helmets, without any gloves, but often barefooted and with their little hands. Instead of having a carefree childhood with unforgettable joyful moments, they are daily facing many physical hazards. Climate change is undoubtedly increasing the number of children who are forced to work. They lost all their rights to be a child and became the “Angles with broken wings” our planet hell. Bangladesh has been ranked as one of the "world's worst countries for workers" in terms of workers' rights.

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As day labour I drive a vehicle to carry tiles. For this COVID lockdown, last 10 days all the tiles market shut down and I lost my work. Now I don’t have money to feed my children. I came outside and sitting up my vehicle because my little son crying for food. It’s not possible for me to see his crying as a father.

Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries affected by climate change and the aftermath is only worsening. Climate change and variability have already had a major impact on livelihoods around riverine areas and in arid and semi-arid regions in Bangladesh. The country is already suffering increasing impacts of temperature rise, drastic variable rainfall, extreme weather events and sea-level rise. The number of climate refugees in the country is therefore growing. Losing everything they had in their villages, these people are moving into cities like Dhaka in search of a better life. The already overcrowded capital is taking a heavy toll on its amenity, serving additional mouths every day. For climate refugees, mostly deprived of minimum academic education, it is difficult to get instant work in the city. Majority of them end up being day labourers. But such work can seriously damage one's health. Rita is a young Bangladeshi girl who works as a coal unloader at a Dhaka port. Ten years ago, she moved to Dhaka with her five-member family after river erosion grasped their homestead in southern Bhola district. Her mother initially started working as a day labourer while Rita tried to continue study. But to support the family, she eventually turned into a day labourer as well within a few years following her mother's footsteps. They started working in the coal unloading business. Unaware of the fatal, dark and chronic sides of the carbon bearing work, the mother-daughter barely knew what would happen to them in the long run. Coal workers are at risk of developing a lung disease called "Pneumoconiosis" due to continuous exposure to the airborne, respirable dust. Exposures more than five years may increase risks of lung cancer that would end up in early deaths. But reality is that the climate refugees don't have the luxury to choose. They live one day at a time only to survive.

27 September 2020 A woman draws drinking water from a cloth set out to catch rainwater, in the village of Kalabogi, in the Sundarbans mangrove forest, Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh. People living in Kalabogi and the Sundarbans region suffer from a water shortage in the dry season as a result of increasing salinity in the groundwater, and of the river Satkhira, caused by rising sea levels. Houses in villages like Kalabogi are raised on poles to avoid frequent tidal flooding. A 2016 World Bank report states that the climate crisis poses a number of threats to the Sundarbans, including rising sea levels and the frequency and intensity of storms. Satellites have found the sea advancing by 200 meters a year in parts of the region. Academic studies indicate an estimated 20 million people living along the Bangladesh coast are affected by salinity in drinking water. More than half of the coastal areas are impacted by salinity, which reduces soil productivity and vegetation growth, degrading the environment and impacting people’s lives and livelihoods. Rice paddies and cultivable land are converted to shrimp farms, which further contribute to groundwater salinity and soil degradation.

K M Asad is a Bangladeshi Dhaka-based professional documentary photographer and photojournalist.

Bangladesh, home to more than 160 million people, is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. The country is experiencing rapid urbanization, with an internal migration to cities of around 3.5 percent every year. Currently, the size of the urban population in Bangladesh is 53 million, of which around 40 percent are children. There are two drivers behind this reality: besides seeking employment in the rapidly growing garment industry, people move to cities after losing their village homes, livelihoods and land following disasters driven by climate change. Bangladesh’s geographical location makes it highly vulnerable to rising sea levels, river erosion and stronger cyclones. Every year, climate change forces half a million Bangladeshis from their homes in rural areas, primarily fishermen and farmers. The majority finds itself in the slums of Dhaka. Dhaka is the most densely populated city in the world. Around 2000 people newly arrive in the city every single day – full of hope and dreams of a better life. There are more than 5’000 slums in Dhaka city, with an estimated population of over 4 million. But life in the city presents countless severe challenges. Around 75 percent of slum households live in one room, as per the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) from 2013. People rarely own land, instead they pay tremendous amounts of money for unsafe homes. Drainage systems flood with poisonous water when it rains. Fresh water is scarce and garbage is piling up everywhere. For children living in slum areas, life is particularly difficult and often dangerous, with high rates of malnourishment, school dropout, child marriage, child labor, and abuse. The situation of children in urban slums is much worse than in rural Bangladesh, as per data from the Child Well Being Survey 2016 and the MICS. Many people dream of going back home, but what do they have left? This is now their future.

“For the past six months, we have not been able to sleep because of the “thieves”. They come at night and eat our food”, says the Garo village headman’s wife Mimita. She says that almost every night, a herd of 40 to 50 elephants moves across the border from Meghalaya, India into the Sherpur District in Bangladesh. The elephants sneak up silently, in search of food, they destroy paddy fields, sometimes houses. Visar Kobir headman is angry: “If they eat our rice, how do I feed my family?” He is sad too, he has lost his brother Opu Mark because of a clash with a wild Elephant on 27 May, 2021. Another villager survived a clash with an elephant, in his helplessness he filed a case against the giant with the local police. The villagers in the border areas whose lives depend on subsistence farming, spend months of sleepless nights during the rice cultivation seasons twice every year. They light fires, roam the fields with strong flashlights and use horns and drums to keep the elephants at distance. They are frightened to lose their rice; the months of hard physical labor could be in vain, their livelihood lost at any moment. Asian wild elephants have been living in Bangladesh for thousands of years. The increasing settlement in forests and hills, the grabbing of forest land and unplanned development have led to a vast destruction of the elephants’ natural habitat. Elephants are increasingly forced out of the forests in search of food – a cause for intense conflicts between elephants and humans. According to forest officials, more than 50 wild elephants fell victim to this conflict in the past five years, 34 of them in 2021 alone. The biggest threat to the elephants’ survival is live electric wires that farmers use to keep out grazing elephants. The remaining estimated 260 wild elephants in Bangladesh have been listed as critically endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) due to the diminishing habitat and unusual deaths. If solutions are not created very soon, Asian wild elephants will no longer be found in Bangladesh in the near future.

K M Asad Independent Documentary photographer Based in Dhaka, Bangladesh.