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

Abstract

Climate reductive translations of migration attract international attention, but result in three problematic misreadings of Bangladesh's socioecological landscape. First, attributing migration to climate change misreads coastal vulnerabilities and the importance of migration as a gendered livelihood strategy to deal with rural precarity and debt-both in the past and present. Second, misreading migration caused by brackish tiger-prawn cultivation, infrastructure-related waterlogging and riverbank erosion as 'climate-induced' hinders a discussion of long-term solutions for rural underemployment, salinisation, siltation and land loss. Lastly, framing climate change as causing 'gendered displacement' ignores the importance of affective kinship relations in shaping single women's migration choices.

Local social-ecological context explains seasonal rural-rural migration of the poorest in south-west Bangladesh

“…The seasonal rural-to-rural migration of unskilled workers is rooted in the changing socialecological context of this community. Attributing local environmental changes solely to climate change is a misinterpretation and an oversimplification of this social-ecological system [4] and climate migration [21] and obliterates other changes at different scales. The resulting complexity of this "polycrisis" [79,80] lies in the interconnected effects of direct and indirect climate-induced and other global and local changes, which increase local inequalities and vulnerabilities [4,12,13].…”

“…Migration is complex in form, origin and destination, temporality, investment and outcome [17] and pathways connecting climate to migration are multiple and non-linear [18]. In short, climate-induced migration decisions and pathways are embedded in a complex socio-economic, behavioural, and environmental context [19,20], and ignoring this complexity might lead to overlooking other important non-climate induced changes, thus hampering long term solutions [4,21] by misreading the evolution of the Bangladesh delta and the associated livelihoods.…”

Climate, floods, and migration in Pakistan

“…Unfortunately, the long‐term and interactive nature of these issues is overlooked due to the ‘climate reductive discourse’ of migration and development interventions (Dewan, 2023). The government of Pakistan argues that the 2022 floods created a cascade of economic, political and social crises (GoP, 2022) yet it underplays the role of long‐standing energy and water policy in exacerbating rural poverty and rampant food insecurity.…”