Camelia Dewan speaks on the Pitfalls of Climate Change Narratives in Bangladesh

Mar 18

On Friday, February 18, Dr. Camelia Dewan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at Oslo University, spoke on the dangers of misidentifying the causes of environmental degradation purely as climate change, referencing her book on this issue called “Misreading the Bengal Delta: Climate Change, Development, and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh.” The talk identified capitalist profit motives and western chauvinist attitudes as the primary reasons for the detrimental effects of development projects meant to curb climate change’s effects.

Dr. Dewan’s discussion questioned the popular narrative of Bangladesh as a country at the risk of drowning due to rising sea levels and pointed out how this narrative leads to solutions that oftentimes create local environmental crises on their own. Dr. Dewan referenced how “projects that are based on the same capitalist mode of production as in the past […] exacerbate environmental crises while sometimes diverting funds away from where they might most be needed.”

Indeed, many outlets tend to repeat the narrative of Bangladesh as a climate victim at acute risk of flooding, contributing to a monocausal analysis of the environmental issues facing the country. This can also be referred to as climate reductionism, “the increasing tendency to attribute all changes in environment and society to climate.” As a result, the western development investment community and larger funding organizations like the World Bank often stress the primacy of river embankments as the solution to building climate resilience for the country. However, as Dr. Dewan outlined, these embankments actually have their own severely detrimental effects on the local environment.

Dr. Dewan beginning her presentation (Image taken by Philipp Moeller, *The Caravel*)

The basic issue with the portrayal of Bangladesh as a drowning country due to climate change is that it often tends to conflate regular monsoon flooding with malignant irregular floods, describing both as part of the same problem. During her presentation, Dr. Dewan explained how the Bengal delta, the low-lying coastal region of Bangladesh characterized by meandering rivers and the Sunderbans mangrove forests, does not actually require such embankment projects. “The flooding of silted river water raises land levels each year keeping pace with sea-level rise. So this silted delta has an innate ability to adapt to a certain amount of sea-level rise.”

Dr. Dewan outlined the historical development of river embankments as the direct result of British colonial land-use practices, that deforested areas for agricultural purposes and then sought to protect these agricultural spaces and rail lines with first temporary dikes, then impermeable floodwalls. After the British left, these embankments were expanded and strengthened in the Coastal Embankment Project, funded by western development aid like USAID. The primacy of embankment in the climate change resilience strategy of western investors today then shows the “links between colonial knowledge production and the knowledge production of climate change.”

The embankments have harmful effects on the local environment. Naturally, their purpose is to limit the river’s flow and flooding to protect the land from both regular monsoon floods and irregular cyclones. By limiting the flow of the water though, the embankments also limit the ways in which the river can transport silt onto the land. “As the silt could no longer deposit on the floodplains, they would instead deposit outside [the embankments] in the river, raising the riverbeds.” Ultimately, this can lead to the drying up of rivers due to the buildup of silt within them. This in turn leads to the loss of potential draining opportunities for water during floods, which the enclosure of the floodplains had already reduced, increasing the severity of flooding. Ironically then, embankments meant to protect from flooding “increase the risk of siltation that chokes water bodies and increases man-made floods.” The loss of regular river siltation furthermore harms the biodiversity and fertility of the soil.

The presentation also addressed a number of other issues in development, namely how “climate change has become a buzzword used to attract donor funding,” where even projects that only have very little to do with climate change are made more attractive to western donors by pretending that they help deal with its effects. Some of these development projects, like one helping with generating clean drinking water for rural communities, were helpful for these local communities regardless of their relevance to climate change. Other such developments, however, such as those using saltwater reservoirs to cultivate tiger prawns, were generally harmful as they made what were formerly common water sources unusable to the community.

Dr. Dewan concluded her talk by emphasizing the importance of understanding the priorities of her interlocutors in her field research in Bangladesh and the cultivation of bottom-up perspectives. Oftentimes, she found that the local women that she interviewed were little concerned with climate change and its flooding effects, but rather emphasized “high out-of-pocket expenditure on healthcare and education, underemployment, and domestic violence.” Though climate change doubtless remains an issue in Bangladesh, Dr. Dewan’s discussion emphasized that development investors should not consider themselves superior and instead consult local residents on what they require most.