SAJJAD HOSSAIN, back from bhasan char

As dawn broke over Bhasan Char, Mohammad Nur, a Rohingya refugee, stepped out of his shelter with an axe and headed towards a patch of trees on the island, southwest of Sandwip and 37 miles off the coast of the Bay of Bengal.

After a 15-minute walk, he reached a thicket of coastal vegetation. He began cutting branches of a kewra tree, chopped them into pieces and carried them home to use them as firewood. He stored them in a small kitchen space in his shelter in Cluster 23.

“Over the last two months, I have cut at least 14 trees,” Nur told this correspondent who visited the island last month.

When Nur, now in his late 20s, arrived on the island with his family from a congested Rohingya camp in Cox’s Bazar five years ago, life felt relatively stable.

Apart from having a roof over their heads, they received Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) cylinders for cooking through aid distribution.

However, the LPG supply began to dwindle in August last year, making it increasingly difficult to cook meals for his seven-member family. About three months ago, the supply ground to an abrupt halt. With no gas and no alternatives available, Nur turned to the only source of fuel within reach: the island’s trees.

“What else could we do? How will we survive if we cannot cook food?” asked Nur, who lives with his wife, three sons, a daughter, and his younger brother in the shelter.

Nur is not alone. Across the island under Noakhali’s Hatiya upazila, members of around 8,000 Rohingya families enter the forest in small groups to collect firewood, carrying axes, sacks and ropes.

For more than 34,000 Rohingya refugees on the 40-square-kilometre island, collection

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