Cllr Rabina Khan: 'What Bangladesh can teach us about climate change'

Everyone in the borough would be constantly talking about nothing but climate change if they thought there was an imminent danger that it might kill them tomorrow.

As it is, we tend to complain about the weather as usual and ignore it. 

In Bangladesh, climate change is not just being talked about, it is being actively tackled and has been for some years - because adapting to climate change for Bangladeshis is literally a matter of life or death.

Massive flooding every year, a drought every five years and the occasional typhoon does concentrate the mind. 

The sad - if predictable - thing is that far too many people living in the west think they are the climate change experts. They are not. 

Bangladeshi farmers are adapting to changing weather patterns by diversifying farm production from wheat and rice to a range of vegetables, raising road levels, building homes with much higher foundations and creating new drainage channels.  

The large Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets are acutely aware of this.  

With this practice comes expert knowledge accumulated over many years. It may be that soon Bangladesh will be exporting climate change knowledge to the west.