Biggest refugee camp braces for rain: ‘this is going to be a catastrophe’

New York: The world's largest refugee camp, a temporary home to more than half a million people that sprawls precariously across barren hills in south-eastern Bangladesh, faces a looming disaster when the first storms of the monsoon season hit, aid workers warn.

"It's going to be landslides, flash floods, inundation," said Tommy Thompson, chief of emergency support and response for the World Food Program. "It's going to be a very, very challenging wet season. That's if we don't have a cyclone.”

‘A warming atmosphere can hold more moisture and unleash more intense downpours, and make wet places even wetter’

Nearly 600,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees live in the camp, at Cox's Bazar, near the southern tip of Bangladesh. Cyclones, which can occur from March to July, would considerably worsen the situation beyond the dangers of flooding and landslides.

Read the story from The Age by Somini Sengupta - “Biggest refugee camp braces for rain: ‘this is going to be a catastrophe’.”