Floating people, changing climate: a migrant-sensitive approach to climate adaptation and mobilities in the Bengal Delta

Abstract

Climate adaptation efforts in the Bengal Delta do not fully integrate migrants, who have moved between rural and urban spaces for decades for diverse reasons that now include the impacts of climate change. Despite the reality of mobile lives in the region, organisations implementing adaptation projects approach circular mobilities as undesirable, against ideals for development. These organisations play a crucial role in shaping how migrants as floating people are considered in such a climate-vulnerable context. Drawing upon a combined 16 months of fieldwork in the Bengal Delta region of India and Bangladesh and using data from in-depth interviews with diverse organisational actors, we find that adaptation projects in this region are mainly designed to keep people in place, as stationary populations in either urban destinations or rural areas of origin. They fail to address the multiplicity of mobilities in the region and neglect compounded vulnerabilities of migrants in the face of intersecting crises such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the findings, we conceptualise and call for a migrant-sensitive approach to adaptation that embraces local complexities of climate-related (im)mobilities and development.