Modhumita, a housewife and mother of two, hasn't had a full nights sleep since May - not since her house and the small shrimp hatchery her family owned got washed away by Cyclone Aila and her two small children almost died.

The last time I was down in her village, Shakbaria, a small community of about a 40-50 mainly Hindu families who live at the south-western coastal belt of Khulna, Bangladesh, her family of seven were still living in a makeshift house made of straw, fronds and plastic sheeting provided by Save the Children.

This was almost four months after the Cyclone had hit their previous house - the one that got washed away was of an NGO prescribed "climate-resilient" variety. The houses that had been built to stand tall even against the onslaught of violent, tropical storms, got washed away by the fierce tidal surge of unprecedented velocity. Our early warning systems had only predicted the storm, not the ferocity of the tidal surge. The collateral damage was not caused by the storm, but by the mighty tidal surge that it had propelled. This shows once again that we need to scale up our disaster risk reduction efforts and hone our early warning systems.

I have worked with the two different kinds of climate change survivors—the ones who live at the forefront, on the coast, and deal with the frequent calamities, and the ones who have migrated to the cities because they figured survival, which is hard enough in this part of the world under normal circumstances, would just be easier if they didn't have to fight a huge storm or flood every few months. The latter group seems to be increasing in number. But not out of choice.

For the families who live at the coast, migration to cities is not a choice; it's a necessity. The coast now has fewer jobs, lesser cultivatable land or even dry land to build houses on; schools get flooded and closed down, trees, crops and vegetation are dying from salinity, fresh drinking water is always scarce in supply and job options are limited. But here's the irony - things are worse in the cities.

The cities are overcrowded. The shanties or slums where the migrant families take shelter are already too cramped with their former residents. The condition of the sewerage system is abominable as it continues to contaminate drinking water sources; housing is scarce and very expensive, as is the cost of living. Hence the whole family, including the young children, have to be sent to work for the family to afford food and rent. I met one ten-year old boy in a Dhaka slum called Rubel, who's been working since he was just five-years old. His parents had moved to Dhaka after their home had been washed away by river erosion.

Sitting here at the forefront of climate change we hear talks of helping climate change migrants cope with their changing lives in the city. While I applaud this effort, I can't help but wonder if this is how we're looking at reducing risks and damage from disasters - by shifting people away from the disaster zones. Because clearly, this is will be quite myopic and not to mention, not at all sustainable.

Bangladesh is barely the size of England and Wales put together and has a population of over 150 million. Where are we planning on whisking people away? We have no space.

As the world gears up for the December talks in Copenhagen, life is still not picking up speed in the Aila- devastated areas of Khulna and Satkhira. With scores of families still living in makeshift houses on the embankment and children are still dependent on humanitarian aid for their basic needs of food, safe drinking water, and medicine, and most importantly a safe shelter, life is still far from "normal".

The damaged embankment is still home to thousands who lost their homes to the cyclone and have been unable to rebuild it - partly because they don't have the resources and partly because the embankments continue to collapse at old and new points, with every new moon tide - gon - and heavy downpours, despite continuous repair. The river mud being used for repair work either gets washed down by the rain or the high-tide, causing the weakened structure to cave in frequently. The make-shift houses on the embankment are by no means safe, sanitary or sustainable. Every time the embankment collapses, the nearby houses get flooded.

Sadly, we need to wait till dry season, which begins sometime in November, to repair and fortify the embankment. This will be very expensive, because the dynamics affecting these embankments, which were built back in the 60's, have changed. The kind of embankments we need now to protect us against the changing pattern and velocity of disasters will require huge investment. Where this will money come from?

But what is most jarring about the whole scenario is that given the present trends in climate change - higher frequency and intensity in disasters, more forceful tidal waves and rising water levels - this "makeshift" lifestyle can become the norm for the region. How will these people cope? Who will help them? Or will they also be forced to migrate?

What bothers me most is that while most of the world's brilliant minds around the world are occupied developing complicated models and equations to figure out the phenomena, very little is being done to help the people living at the fore-front adapt to their changing situation. Whilst its absolutely necessary to have these debates on what's causing climate change, whether its good or bad and how best we can deal with it, I think it's even more important to think about the people who have to live with climate change. People like Rubel and Modhumita, who, for aid workers like us, are the human faces of the climate change and disasters. And while the world tries to figure out what caused the disaster, we're the ones left to pick up the pieces and put them back together again - a job that is becoming increasingly difficult.

What scares me most is that after the next disaster that strikes Bangladesh, Modhumita, like Rubel's family will also move to the city, which will in no way improve her situation - this is provided of course that we are able to save the whole of her family from the next flood or cyclone. Without a comprehensive disaster risk reduction and emergency preparedness plan in place, saving people from the onslaught of high frequency disasters will get increasingly difficult.

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