"Rising Tide Of Climate Migrants Spurs Dhaka To Seek Solutions"

"DHAKA - On the streets of this South Asian mega-city, jammed solid with rickshaws, honking taxi vans, cars, bicycles, sweating pedestrians and lumbering buses with their paint scraped off in tight squeezes, getting anywhere quickly by road is impossible.

The 100-metre drive from the airport parking lot to the first intersection can take half an hour. Getting right across town requires many hours. That's what keeps Sirajul Islam, chief urban planner for Dhaka South City Corporation, awake at night.

'Traffic,' he sighed, asked about his main concerns for the fast-growing city. 'Though of course there are so many worries.'

Bangladesh's capital city of 20 million people is growing by close to 5 percent a year, in part as rural families migrate to the city seeking work or having lost their homes to worsening river erosion and storm surges that flood fields with salt water."

Laurie Goering reports for the Thomson Reuters Foundation April 26, 2016.