DHAKA: Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are at heightened risk of losing access to essential services, the UN refugee agency has warned as it struggles to secure adequate funding.

Bangladesh hosts more than 1.3 million Rohingya on its southeast coast, who are cramped inside 33 camps in Cox’s Bazar — the world’s largest refugee settlement.

Nearly 150,000 of them have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine State over the past 18 months in what has become the largest influx since 2017, when some 750,000 Rohingya crossed to neighboring Bangladesh to escape a deadly crackdown by Myanmar’s military, which the UN has been referring to as a textbook case of ethnic cleansing.

“With the acute global funding crisis, the critical needs of both newly arrived refugees and those already present will be unmet, and essential services for the whole Rohingya refugee population are at risk of collapsing,” the UNHCR said in a statement issued on Friday.

Only 35 percent of UNHCR’s $255 million appeal for the Rohingya has been funded.

Unless the agency secures additional funds, health services for the Rohingya population in Bangladesh will be “severely disrupted by September and essential cooking fuel, or LPG, will run out. By December, food assistance will stop.”

Severe aid cuts from major donors, such as the US under President Donald Trump and other Western countries, have had a major impact on the humanitarian sector.

The education of Rohingya children has already been impacted, as the UN’s children agency UNICEF was forced to suspend thousands of learning centers in Cox’s Bazar last month, worsening an education crisis for about 437,000 school-age children in the camps.

“The funding crisis for the Rohingyas is in a very dire state now. The health sector is next, as it is hit hard by the fund crunch. Many of the health centers have suspended their services that severely impacted thousands of pregnant women, lactating mothers, newborn babies and children,” Mizanur Rahman, refugee relief and repatriation commissioner in Cox’s Bazar, told Arab News on Saturday.

Bangladesh has not been able to arrange new shelters for the newly arrived Rohingya, with most of them now living with relatives who arrived earlier, he added.

“Site management, which covers the water and sanitation issues, is also reeling. Shelter management is facing a bad situation,” Rahman said.

“The ongoing crisis may force the Rohingyas to complete desperation.”

UNITED NATIONS: Sand and dust storms affect about 330 million people in over 150 countries and are taking an increasing toll on health, economies and the environment, the UN World Meteorological Organization says.

“About 2 billion tons of dust are emitted yearly, equivalent to 300 Great Pyramids of Giza” in Egypt, the organization’s UN representative, Laura Paterson, told the General Assembly.

More than 80 percent of the world’s dust comes from the deserts in North Africa and the Middle East, she said, but it has a global impact because the particles can travel hundreds and even thousands of kilometers (miles) across continents and oceans.

The General Assembly was marking the International Day of Combating Sand and Dust Storms on Saturday and its designation of 2025 to 2034 as the UN decade on combating sand and dust storms.

Assembly President Philemon Yang said the storms “are fast becoming one of the most overlooked yet far-reaching global challenges of our time.”

“They are driven by climate change, land degradation and unsustainable practices,” he said.

Yang, in a speech Thursday that was read by an assembly vice president, said airborne particles from sand and dust storms contribute to 7 million premature deaths every year. He said they trigger respiratory and cardiovascular disease, and reduce crop yields by up to 25 percent, causing hunger and migration.

Undersecretary-General Rola Dashti, head of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, told the assembly the storms’ economic costs are “staggering.”

In the Middle East and North Africa, the annual cost of dealing with dust and sandstorms is $150 billion, roughly 2.5 percent of GDP, she said.

“This spring alone, the Arab region experienced acute disruption,” Dashti said, citing severe storms in Iraq that overwhelmed hospitals with respiratory cases and storms in Kuwait and Iran that forced schools and offices to close.

Dust from the Sahara Desert in Africa has reached as far as the Caribbean and Florida, she said.

Dashti, who also co-chairs the UN Coalition on Combating Sand and Dust Storms, said over 20 UN and international agencies are working to unite efforts on early warning systems for storms and to deal with other issues, including health and financing.

She urged all countries to put sand and dust storms into global and national agendas.

“From land restoration and sustainable agriculture to integrated early warning systems, we have the tools to act,” Dashti said. “What we need now is collective determination and financing to bring these solutions to scale.”