Chapter 12 Embanking the Sundarbans: The Obfuscating Discourse of Climate Change

Climate refugees or labour migrants? climate reductive translations of women’s migration from coastal Bangladesh

“…My jorib in Nodi revealed that there were significantly more landless women (without capital or male adult earners in the household) that coveted these short-term rural employment schemes despite low wages and no social or health insurance: they provided an income for a fixed duration. The project-mentality of the development industry serves to perpetuate a system that only provides temporary patches to large-scale problem of structural rural un(der)employment and sustain a form of labour market based on precarious, low-cost labour (Dewan 2021a; See also Qureshi 2014). Coastal vulnerabilities here are fundamentally tied to socio-economic inequalities.…”

“…Rural livelihoods thrive on fertile agricultural soils and the original purpose of floodprotection embankments in this region was to keep out saline intrusion in the rivers during the dry season (Dewan 2021a). Shrimp businessmen drill unauthorised pipes and cut embankments in order to flood these arable lands with brackish watersrendering them structurally unstable (de Silva 2012).…”

“…Monsoon borsha floods have long been integral to agricultural activities when silt-laden river water mixed with rain and inundated these deltaic wetlands, this fertilised the soil and irrigated rice fields while providing essential breeding ground for fish (Zaman 1993). The construction of donor-funded 'flood-protection' embankments in the 1960s obstructed these borsha floods and trapped silt in the outside river (Dewan 2021a). The difference in elevation of a raised riverbed and a sunken floodplain resulted in rainwater being unable to drain and caused damaging jalabaddho floods [drainage congestion, waterlogging] (Iqbal 2010) that we often see in media portrayals of 'flooded Bangladesh' (Dewan 2021b) (Figure 2).…”

Women as subjects of risk in Bangladesh’s coastal riskscapes

“…In coastal Bangladesh, the embankment, which runs through the landscape alongside the riverbanks and coastal shores, is often an integrated part of villages. While it protects the villages against high tides and flooding (although this can be debated, see Dewan, 2021Dewan, , 2022, it often also functions as the main road and thus constitutes a central space in how villages are structured. Embankments are commonly built at a certain distance inland to avoid erosion, which means that there is often a strip of land between the embankment and the shore.…”