When Cyclone Yaas slammed into her home in southwest Bangladesh in May, destroying it and sweeping away in the floodwaters the small amount of cash she had saved, Amina Begum had few options.

Efforts to recover from four previous cyclones since 2009 had depleted her resources, and her husband’s death five years ago left the burden of caring for their two children solely to her.

So Begum took the only option available: She sold her gold wedding earrings, her last valuable, for 5,000 taka ($58) and moved with her children to Notun Bazar, a slum in Khulna, the nearest big city.

“There was nothing else left to me,” she said, standing in the narrow alleyways of her new neighbourhood, where the pungent smell of rotting food fills the air and mosquitoes torment residents at night.

She now earns about 400 taka ($4.70) a day as a day labourer in the city, most of which goes to pay for the tiny rooms she rents. She said she no longer has any savings.

As climate change disasters and losses surge around the world, the world’s poorest, who can least afford it, are paying the bulk of the costs, making them effectively the world’s ‘silent financiers’ of climate losses and adaptation efforts, researchers say.

That is a reality largely still unrecognised internationally, said Paul Steele, chief economist for the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

The poor in countries such as Bangladesh are facing an “impossible situation” trying to pay for losses they and others in poor countries — most of them low contributors to climate-changing emissions - did not cause, he said.

Read the full article about class disparities in climate crisis by Thomson Reuters Foundation at Eco-Business.