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).