As climate change impacts and losses from them grow, who is paying the costs?

In Bangladesh - and many other countries - it's the poor picking up most of the bill, even as wealthier nations with high climate-changing emissions continue to fuel the problem.

Researchers believe Bangladesh's poor are now paying $2 billion a year from their own pockets to try to adapt to worsening floods, erosion and other climate-linked problems.

That's twice the amount spent by Bangladesh's own government and 12 times what international donors provide, they say.

One of those bearing the burden is Amina Begum.

Widowed and hit by five cyclones since 2009, she saw her home and the meagre savings she stored there swept away by Cyclone Yaas in May.

Afterwards, with few options left, she sold her gold wedding earrings - her last valuable - and moved with her children to Notun Bazar, a slum in Khulna, the nearest big city in southern Bangladesh.

"There was nothing else left to me," she told our visiting reporter Mosabber Hossain, as she stood in the narrow alleyways of her new neighbourhood, where the pungent smell of rotting food fills the air and mosquitoes torment residents at night.

Growing climate change losses are hitting the poorest and most vulnerable hardest - but they are affecting richer nations and communities as well.

More frequent and serious floods are expected to cost U.S. businesses and local economies, from Miami to Pittsburgh, $50 billion in losses in 2022. That's next year - not decades away.

"You talk about commercial activity, you're talking about the economic activity that underpins the entire community," said Jeremy Porter, head of research at the First Street Foundation, a non-profit group that maps climate risk.

In the Philippines, meanwhile, women are dealing with growing climate risk by training as "solar scholars", capable of operating solar-powered equipment to run lifesaving medical devices and other vital services during disasters.

They are also promoting expansion of home solar panels in a country still heavily reliant on coal and oil for power.

“As long as you have a panel, you’ll have affordable and reliable power,” noted 66-year-old Lorna dela Pena, who received the training and is encouraging other local women to take up solar.

See you next week!

Laurie

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