‘Tackling Climate Displacement In The City: Legal Interventions to Ensure Life and Livelihood in Informal Settlements’

Bangladesh Paribesh Andolon/Bangladesh Environment Network Conference   
“Energy, Climate Change, and Sustainable Development” 
11-12 February 2022
Tackling Climate Displacement In The City: 
Legal Interventions to Ensure Life and Livelihood in Informal Settlements
Efadul Huq, Sara Hossain, and Ayesha Akhter^[1]

Introduction

More than 6 million people, in some estimates, have been displaced due to climate change in Bangladesh. Internally displaced ‘climate refugee’ communities have adapted by migrating to cities and urbanizing centers of Bangladesh. They have made their homes in tenure-insecure informal settlements, which are often environmentally hazardous sites. In these settlements, many climate displaced communities have undergone further rounds of displacement through evictions, fires, or disasters such as floods. 

Over the past 30 years, climate refugees in Bangladesh have sought legal protection from the Supreme Court to secure their lives and livelihoods in the informal settlements of urban centers. The legally unprotected status of Bangladesh’s climate refugees is only one dimension of an interlocking set of issues. First, planning authorities have consistently disregarded the needs of these climate displaced communities in the urban master plans. Second, environmental and social movements, more focused on demanding accountability from global polluters, have sidelined the priorities of climate displaced communities living in slums and settlements. Unprotected by law, excluded by planning, and ignored by environmental social movements, the real voices and needs of climate refugees in Bangladesh’s informal settlements are not represented in the plans, policies, and movements for climate adaptation and justice in Bangladesh. In this context, it is imperative to take stock of the decades-long legal activism of climate displaced communities themselves against evictions. Their struggles, simply to stay put, has temporarily secured housing for the climate displaced and given us working examples of adaptation (no matter how temporary or incomplete). Across Dhaka and Chattogram, multiple slum-dwelling communities of climate displaced people have fought back against cycles of evictions. (Read More)

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