Last week the BBC visited Char Atra, a small island community in Bangladesh, where Oxfam is supporting people to adapt to climate change and find alternative livelihoods. Cate Heinrich reports.

Last week, together with the BBC, I returned to Char Atra, a river island in southern Bangladesh, to see how this community had coped with an unusual monsoon this year.

It’s difficult for the people here to know what to expect as climate change hits their community hard and in different ways. Some years they are forced to cope with unpredictable high floods that wash away their land and homes, and then this year there was no rain at all.

One woman happy about the lack of rainfall was Nargis Begum, who gave birth to her son in August. When we met her earlier in the year she was scared that she may have her baby in the flood shelter, or on a platform raised above the floodwater in her home. But with no flood, Nargis was able to have a risk-free birth and, although proudly showing us her baby son, Shagor, she admitted, “I was hoping for a girl this time… I now have four boys!”

It was not good news for everyone. The extreme weather conditions bring incredible hardship to the local fishermen and farmers. They have struggled this year with hardly any fish in the river and not enough water to harvest the jute or rice crops.

Oxfam is working with the people of Char Atra to adapt to climate change and find alternative livelihoods. On the day I visited, about 300 women received vegetable seeds in a distribution organised by SDS, Oxfam’s partner organisation.

And whenever the BBC’s Mark Dummett asked women about why they were rearing ducks - another livelihood option provided by SDS - rather than chickens, the response was immediate: “Because they can swim in the floods.”

We watched the sun set over the char as filming came to an end for the day. And I thought of the inspirational people I’ve met in Char Atra throughout the year. The fishermen like Geetu who are now working as day labourers to support their families, the mothers such as Sufia who lost children in the floods and then the hope from women like Nargis, as she holds her new baby son.

Char Atra is just one small community in Bangladesh. It represents the thousands of villages coping with a changing environment. And, importantly, the 20 million more people in Bangladesh who will be drastically affected in the future by climate change, unless governments choose to act now.

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