The apocalyptic visions of climate change that are projected in the media often involve extreme weather events, disasters and mass migration of poor people. This book takes a critical look at this notion, drawing on research in Bangladesh, a country located at the heart of debates on climate change and migration. This book argues that rather than leading to dramatic events, climatic and environmental impacts often cause incremental changes in people’s habitats and livelihoods, making them migrate in search of better places and income. With or without climate change, climatic and environmental factors can impoverish people, and drive displacement and migration, especially in the global South. These influences, including disasters, need not necessarily make people move, but instead sometimes trap the poorest and the most vulnerable people in their places exposed to hazards or make them migrate to even riskier places, such as crowded and flood-prone urban slums. This book argues that restrictions placed on people’s mobility options could increase their vulnerability and favours proactive migration policies. This timely contribution explains the climate-hazard-migration nexus in an accessible, engaging language for students of geography, development studies, politics and environmental studies, as well as humanitarian and development practitioners and policymakers.

Climate Change in Bangladesh: Confronting Impending Disasters is a comprehensive analysis of climate change impacts on Bangladesh, followed by a review of measures for confronting the manifested threats of climate change on the people and environment of Bangladesh. Using an integrative approach, the authors blend their own work on indigenous adjustments to climatic hazards in Bangladesh with an analysis of the role of modern engineering intervention and disaster management policies in alleviating these hazards. There is also an emphasis on the environment and people of coastal Bangladesh who are at risk of inundation due to global warming–induced sea level rise. Thus, in addition to analyzing main climatic disasters at some length—tropical cyclones (hurricanes), floods, droughts, and sea level rise—key topics of human dimensions of climate change include climate change victims, climate refugees, climate justice, public policies on climate change, and a sample of adaptation measures for living with the rising sea levels.

This book evolved from a collaborative research project between the University of Manitoba, Canada and Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh, which commenced in 1984 to study the problems of river channel migration, rural population displacement and land relocation in Bangladesh. The study was sponsored by the International Development Research Center (IDRC), based in Ottawa, Canada. It was through this project that I started my journey into disaster research more than thirteen years ago with basically an applied problem of massive magnitude in Bangladesh. I spent two- and-a half-years, in two stages, in Bangladesh's riparian villages to collect the empirical data for this study. Then the growing disaster discourse throughout the 1980s, especially its conceptual and theoretical areas, drew me in further, gluing my interest to these issues. In the 1990s, during my research and teaching at Brandon University, Canada, I realized that, despite the large body of literature on natural disasters, there was no work that synthesized the approaches to nature-triggered disasters in a comprehensive form, with sufficient empirical substantiation. In addition, despite the great deal of attention given to disasters in Bangladesh, I found no detailed reference book on the topic. Natural hazards and disasters, in my view, should be studied under a holistic framework encompassing the natural environment, society and individuals. Overreaction to the limitations of technocratic-scientific approaches-the control and prevention of physical events through specialized knowledge and skills-has resulted in a call for "taking the naturalness out of natural disasters.

The Handbook of Climate Change Adaptation addresses the scientific, social, political and cultural aspects of climate change in an integrated and coherent way. The multi-volume reference focuses on one of the key aspects of climate change: adaptation and how to handle its impacts on physical, biotic and human systems, analyzing the social and normative scientific concerns and presenting the tools, approaches and methods aimed at management of climate change impacts. The high-quality, interdisciplinary contributions provides state-of-the-art descriptions of the topics at hand with the collective aim of offering, for a broad readership, an authoritative, balanced and accessible presentation of the best current understanding of the nature and challenges posed by climate change. It serves not only as a valuable information source but also as a tool to support teaching and research and as help for professionals to assist in decision-making.

Compilation of articles by scholars on the environmental challenges, people's ways of adaptation and migration patterns in Bangladesh.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2015 in the subject Earth Science / Geography - Geopolitics, grade: PhD, Panjab University (Panjab University), language: English, abstract: The discourse of ‘climate migrations’ will reinforce the old borders (physical and mental) and create new ‘climate borders’ between India and Bangladesh. In International Relations State system is expected uphold five basic social values security, freedom, order, justice and welfare but climate change would be challenging all these social values. This work revolves around interrelated key concepts of critical geopolitics, imaginative geographies and borders in order to map out geopolitics of fear, deployed through the imaginative geographies of climate induced migrations, and analyze its implications for India and Bangladesh. This work stated that a critical social science intervention in the nascent discourse of ‘climate change migration’ is needed, in order to uncover and analyze the political uses and abuses of climate fear, and growing securitization and militarization of climate change policy and responses. Far from being the problem of National Security and the state and non state actors needs to desecuretise the issue of climate induced migration and shift their attention towards the most neglected aspects of climate affair i.e. the issue climate ethics and equity. This work further explore the prospects of counter imaginative geographies of hope and the role they could possibly play in approaching the issue of climate change induced migration from the angle of human security and human rights of the socially disadvantaged, dispossessed and disadvantage in the Global South.

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2014 in the subject Politics - Region: Far East, , course: M.Phil, language: English, abstract: In the era of globalisation, where opening of borders is being advocated all over the world, there is one issue over which no nation-state is ready to compromise with its territorial borders. The issue of migration and refugees is considered so sensitive that states have often linked it with their sovereignty, independence and even existence. Environmental degradation has become a crucial issue in the contemporary world. The effects of climate change are likely to trigger mass human movement both within and across international borders. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (“UNHCR”) predicts that between 50 and 200 million people may be displaced by 2050. Thus, the human impact on the environment is creating a new kind of global casualty for the twenty-first century—an emergent class of environmental migrants. Environmental crisis in the rural areas of developing countries is increasingly becoming an important cause of cross-border migration of population and South Asia is no exception to this phenomenon. Such movement of population in the Indo-Bangladesh context is generating a range of destabilising socio-political, economic, ethnic and communal tensions in India. It has embittered Indo-Bangladesh relations, causing tensions between the two countries. .

This book is one of the outputs of the conference on ‘Environmental Change, Forced Migration, and Social Vulnerability’ (EFMSV) held in Bonn in October 2008. Migration is one of the oldest adaptation measures of humanity. Indeed, without migration the multitude of civilizations and interactions between them – peaceful and otherwise – would be hard to imagine. The United Nations (UN)-led global dialogue on migration is a clear sign that governments and the specialized UN agencies and bodies have recognized the need to view, govern, manage, and facilitate migration; to mitigate its negative effects; and to capitalize on the positive ones. It is a common expectation among experts that environmentally induced migration will further increase in the decades to come. Hence, next to the political, economic, ethnic, social, financial, humanitarian, and security aspects of migration, the environmental component should urgently be considered in the ongoing international dialogue on migration. This need is also a challenge. Without appropriate scientific knowledge, assessment, definitions, and classifications, the intergovernmental frameworks would not be able to deal with these complex phenomena. The Five-Pronged-Approach as formulated by the United Nations University (UNU) may serve as a framework to identify the additional dimensions of this challenge next to – and actually simultaneously with – the scientific one.

This volume aims to develop a framework for disaster and climate risk resilient livelihood system in Bangladesh using a policy oriented approach. It highlights the possible impacts of climate change on groundwater based irrigation in the country. Climate change is one of biggest challenges to society. It can lead to serious impacts on production, life and environment on a global scale. Higher temperatures and sea level rise will cause flooding and water salinity problems which will bring about negative effects on agriculture and high risks to industry and socio-economic systems in the future. Climate change will lead to many changes in global development and security especially energy, water, food, society, job, diplomacy, culture, economy and trade. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines climate change as: “Any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity.” Global climate change has emerged as a key issue in both political and economic arenas. It is an increasingly questioned phenomenon, and progressive national governments around the world have started taking action to respond to these environmental concerns.

As climate change and extreme weather events increasingly threaten traditional landscapes and livelihoods of entire communities the need to study its impact on human migration and population displacement has never been greater. The Atlas of Environmental Migration is the first illustrated publication mapping this complex phenomenon. It clarifies terminology and concepts, draws a typology of migration related to environment and climate change, describes the multiple factors at play, explains the challenges, and highlights the opportunities related to this phenomenon. Through elaborate maps, diagrams, illustrations, case studies from all over the world based on the most updated international research findings, the Atlas guides the reader from the roots of environmental migration through to governance. In addition to the primary audience of students and scholars of environment studies, climate change, geography and migration it will also be of interest to researchers and students in politics, economics and international relations departments.