They say, in Bangladesh, that climate change has a taste and it
tastes of salt. At the south of the country, salinity is emerging
as a major issue which has already wiped out vast stretches of
arable lands, claimed the livelihoods of many local inhabitants and
displaced them from the place they once called home.

The saline water has intruded into the mainland of
Bangladesh’s southern belt as a consequence of cyclones and
rising sea levels. But in the north of the country millions of
people are also threatened by river bank erosion (RBE), severe
droughts and heavy flooding. An estimated one million people are
affected by RBE every year.¹

A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) report claims that a one meter rise in sea level will
inundate some 13 per cent of land mass in the southern belt,
displacing some 15-20 million people by 2050. At the same time, the
World Bank estimates that by then half of all Bangladeshis will
live in urban centers. These findings suggest a possible
correlation between climate change and the rapid growth of
urbanization in Bangladesh.

For Bangladesh, the current growth rate of urban
population is 4.8 per cent per year. Major metropolitan areas saw
population expand from 1.6 million in 1974 to 20.15 million in
1991. By 2001 this had risen to 23.1 million and by 2006 to 35
million.²

Urban population may reach about 68 million, or 37 per
cent of the total population, by 2015.³ The informal
settlements that have mushroomed in every corner of the capital,
Dhaka, over the past years suggest that the national population is
expected to be predominantly urban centric in roughly three decades
from now.

Urbanization in Bangladesh has been rapid and
unplanned. Events like floods and droughts in many parts of the
country often force people to move and find new jobs, which has
also contributed to the rapid growth of urban populations.

These trends pose a number of questions. Does
Bangladesh have any resettlement strategies to cope with such urban
growth? Will a country like Bangladesh be able to accommodate such
huge numbers of uprooted people in future? Are there policies in
place to address such unplanned movements of people? Or is the
situation heading towards a silent crisis?

Needless to say, a comprehensive account of such urban
migration trends requires more mapping and assessment to understand
where these people are coming from, under what circumstances, by
what means, and more importantly where they are heading.

The most cost effective solution may be to intervene in
the first instance in the migration source areas. This would
require recognition of the climate change-migration/displacement
nexus and imply its inclusion in policy discourse.

Without the concerted efforts of key stakeholders, the
slum population and urban poor are likely to increase at an
alarming rate, creating more pressure on the common pool of
resources and available social services.

An unpublished research⁴ paper on RBE
commissioned by IOM shows that post displacement, migrants are
often subjected to marginalization, social exclusion and
discrimination. They frequently suffer from a lack of health care
and education services, restricted access to land and water, and
social alienation in cooperative societies.

The outcome of such rapid and unregulated internal
displacement/ migration could potentially be serious in terms of
social tension and conflict.

If we recognize Bangladesh’s rapid and unplanned
urbanization as an early warning of a more serious human security
situation in the near future, it would be prudent to take concerted
action without further delay.

But the issue has yet to seriously enter into the
country’s policy discourse and is still subject to
speculation. Some experts suggest that the threat of conflict as a
direct consequence of climate change is overblown.

Nevertheless South Asia, with its porous borders, is a
region where tensions generated by climate-induced displacement
could have serious crossborder implications.

In Bangladesh, migration is often perceived as a
failure of adaptation, and as such is not seen as a major threat to
stability. But managing migration as an adaptation measure can
reduce overall vulnerability, particularly in coastal and RBE-prone
communities.

In this context migration must be voluntary rather than
forced. IOM’s study on RBE mentioned earlier focuses on law,
human rights and environmental displacement in two RBE-prone
districts.

The study shows how inadequate policies and poor
governance set the scene for occupational dislocation, illegal land
grabbing, wage exploitation and denial of land rights, which
eventually led to forced migration.

Due to poor governance and a lack of accountability of
the local authorities, together with land records that failed to
identify the victims, a government initiative to allocate special
land privileges to the affected population remains ineffective.

This suggests that managing displacement is also
closely linked to policy making and governance. IOM in Bangladesh
is working to build the capacity of local government to better
manage internal displacement, and is advocating policies that would
make the decision to migrate a choice rather than a compulsion.

This type of advocacy does not need to be confined to
RBE. Global experience suggests that investing in early warning and
evacuation systems to prepare people for cyclone storms and floods
has saved millions of lives.

Bangladesh, a country widely recognized as one of the
most vulnerable to cyclone storms and constant flooding, is a case
in point. Since 2000 the country country has experienced more than
70 major natural disasters.⁵

One-fifth of the country is flooded every year, and in
some years, up to two-thirds of the land mass has been
inundated.⁶ Weather-related disasters due to climate
change have caused outbreaks of disease, including a diarrhea
outbreak that killed 20 per cent of children under 5 years of age
in 2000.⁷ The findings of a survey conducted by IOM in
2007 following Cyclone Sidr showed a similar pattern.

In the absence of a systematic process to distinguish
economic from climateinduced migrants, the apparent nexus between
climate change and migration is still often treated as
coincidental.

More research is needed to show whether a strong link
exists between climate change and environmental factors and
migration. Greater recognition of this nexus at the policy and
expert level is also needed.

IOM is engaged in generating awareness of the issue to
advance the existing knowledge base on climate-induced migrants. We
believe that immediate action is called for to address this
emerging problem. If not, the day may not be far away when this
potential crisis breaks its silence.

1 Equity and Justice Working
Group, Impact of Climate Change in Bangladesh, Campaign Brief 5,
November 2007

2 Centre for Urban Studies,
Squatters in Bangladesh Cities: A Survey of Urban Squatters in
Dhaka, Chittagong and Khulna- 1974 (Dhaka: CUS, 1976) and
Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics, Bangladesh National Population
Census Report - 1974 (Dhaka: Ministry of Planning, 1977);
Bangladesh Population Census 1991 Urban Area Report (Dhaka:
Ministry of Planning, 1997); Population Census 2001, National
Report (Provisional)

3 Demographic transition: the
Third World scenario, edited by Aijazuddin Ahmad, Daniel Noin, H.N.
Sharma. Jaipur, India, Rawat Publications, 1997.

4 Life on a Swing : Human Rights
of Erosioninduced Displacees, 2008

5 CRED database, (2009).

6 Agarwala, S., et al. (2003)
“Development and climate change in Bangladesh: Focus on coast
flooding and sundarbans.” OECD.

7 World Health Organization
Statistical Information System, (2009).