Gendered dimensions of climate-induced migration in Sunamganj, Bangladesh haor wetlands

Nahin Naznin

The haor wetlands of Sunamganj stretch endlessly toward the sky, a landscape that gives and takes in equal measure. Photo by the author, Nahin Naznin

The first flash flood came early that year, weeks before the paddy was ready for harvest. Piyara, a woman in her forties from a haor village in Sunamganj, in Bangladesh's north-eastern wetlands, remembers watching the water climb over the embankment and swallow a season's labour in a single night. Her husband left for Sylhet city three months later, joining the thousands of men who leave the haor each year in search of work once the water takes the crop. Piyara stayed behind, as most women here do, holding together a household, a homestead, and a community that migration research rarely pauses to look at closely.

The haor, a vast bowl-shaped wetland that floods for half the year and dries into fertile cropland for the other half, is one of Bangladesh's most climate-exposed landscapes. Early monsoon flash floods, arriving before rice can be harvested, have become more frequent and less predictable, and with them has come a steady outmigration of men to Dhaka, Sylhet, and further afield. What gets discussed far less is what happens to the women, children, and elderly who remain: the haor is emptying unevenly, and the burden of that emptying falls disproportionately on those left to manage it.

Scholars of gender and climate change have long argued that vulnerability is never distributed equally within a household. Farhana Sultana's research on gendered waterscapes in Bangladesh shows that women's relationships to water, land, and mobility are shaped by social norms as much as by hydrology, meaning that the same flood can produce very different consequences depending on gender relations and whether one is a man with greater freedom to migrate or a woman whose mobility is constrained by responsibilities and expectations tied to the homestead.

In Piyara's village, that difference is visible in the everyday rhythm of survival. With her husband gone for most of the year, Piyara manages the homestead, cares for two children and an ageing mother-in-law, and takes on agricultural labour that was once shared. She also fields the anxieties of neighbours: rising river erosion near the embankment, a son's school fees, a market that floods before the fish can be sold. ‘When the water comes, it is the women who first make the decisions about what to save and what to let go,’ she told me during a visit to her village. ‘But no one asks us what we think should be done about the water itself’.

That exclusion from decision-making is well documented beyond Sunamganj. Research on gendered vulnerability in Bangladesh's wetland and riverine communities, including work by Ferdous and Mallick on the Teesta basin, finds that discriminatory social norms restrict women's mobility and voice even as climate stress deepens their responsibilities. Naila Kabeer's recent study of gender and agency in Bangladesh similarly argues that women's lives are shaped less by dramatic policy shifts than by slow, everyday renegotiations within the household, renegotiations that climate stress is now forcing at a faster pace than many communities can absorb.

The consequences extend beyond labour and decision-making into safety itself. Women who remain in the haor after their husbands migrate often report increased vulnerability, from disputes over dwindling resources to the strain of unpaid care work that leaves little room for anything else. Girls are sometimes married earlier when a father's income disappears; women take on debt to cover what remittances do not cover in time. None of this shows up in migration statistics that count only the person who left.

A recent roundtable held in Dhaka on the lives of haor women placed a number on the scale of this reality: of the roughly 600,000 to 700,000 people directly dependent on the wetlands for their livelihood, some 200,000 to 300,000 are women whose lives revolve entirely around the haor, as participants at the discussion noted. Speakers at the event, organised with support from the Swedish government, pointed to a troubling gap: almost no dedicated research has tracked how climate change is reshaping women's lives in the haor in recent years, even as the wetlands themselves are studied closely for their ecology and flood patterns.

Grassroots organisations working in Sunamganj have begun to respond to this gap in practical, if modest, ways. Action Aid Bangladesh's work in haor has focused on training women in their rights and in climate-resilient livelihoods, while also working with families to redistribute unpaid care work so that women have more time for income-generating activity. BRAC's Climate Bridge Fund has similarly flagged the haor as an under-researched frontier of climate adaptation, arguing that policy responses so far have been contradictory and thin.

For Piyara, none of this academic framing changes the immediate calculus of her days. She rises before dawn, checks the water level near the embankment out of habit, and gets her children ready before beginning the work that keeps the household afloat until her husband can send money or come home. What she wants is not recognition in a research paper but a say in how her village adapts: which embankments get repaired, which crops get tried next season, whether the money for flood shelters reaches the women who will actually use them.

As migration reshapes the haor, the people staying behind are not incidental to the story of climate change in Bangladesh. They are its frontline. Any resilience plan for Sunamganj that does not put women like Piyara at the centre of its decisions risks solving only half the problem the water has created.

Nahin Naznin 

Nahin is a postgraduate student from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Bangladesh and ICCCAD Innovation Fund Grantee. Her work focuses on climate-induced migration, gender, ecotourism, biodiversity conservation and environmental justice in wetland communities. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the haor regions of Sunamganj district. She can be reached at: email: nahinnaznin156@gmail.com ; LinkedIn