Shonar Bangla’s slow erosion

Why is the environment in Bangladesh still treated as something peripheral to real governance or nation-building? It is telling that even the interim government under Muhammad Yunus, who envisions a world with three zeroes (one being carbon emissions) at the helm of power – negotiating the pressing need of an election against necessary reforms – does not see that perhaps the issue of climate needs to be addressed along with other reforms. 

A cabinet including notable environmentalists, does not see the urgency of appointing a climate reform commission alongside the others which have been decried. Nor does it see the need for its constitution reform commission and the consensus-building work led by it, to emphasise on the climate, let alone prioritise it. As if we can somehow chart a future economic, political or social order without fundamentally reckoning with the climate crisis.  Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries, but this predisposition emerges from thinking of the environment as distinct from everyday politics. If the separation of the everyday and the climate crisis cannot be bridged, then we lose the opportunity to be able to live with the times. 

The lacuna in every policy conversation in Bangladesh is the urgent need to embed environmental responsibility at the level of constitutional design. This is not just about better laws or greener policies; it is about rethinking the fundamental principles of the state. We need a constitution that reflects the ecological limits we live within, one that holds the state accountable for protecting the commons, for delivering justice to the marginalised, for treating environmental degradation not as a policy failure but because of the metaphysical way in which the environment has been separated from our conception of what the state should protect.

Without constitutional accountability, where climate is not a line item but a foundational concern, we are just tinkering at the edges. Elections, governance, even economic planning need to yield space to climate, not treat it as an afterthought. What we are dealing with is not just environmental decay, but a crisis of political imagination. Take, for example, the Bangladesh Water Act. The fundamental definition of the term “river” was missing from the original act, exposing the profound disconnect between lived ecological realities and state frameworks. Even in the constitution, the notion of the river in riverine Bangladesh is not mentioned, let alone safeguarded or adopted. This is precisely what happens when the environment is treated as peripheral: policy-based action is stunted by the unimaginative system. Geography and constitution need to be aligned – one needs to work around the other. 

Land loss refers to the permanent or long-term submergence, erosion, or transformation of inhabitable land. In Bangladesh, this is most visible in coastal and riverine districts, where people lose land not overnight, but gradually, as the river devours homes and fields metre by metre. It does not fit the image of disaster that draws global attention; it unfolds quietly. If climate vulnerabilities are deprioritised in favour of so-called national interest, land loss is not a politically urgent issue. The threat of property loss, however, must be framed in a language people recognise as the loss of property and money. 

The legal framework for managing such loss is outdated. Under the Bengal alluvion and diluvion laws, compensation for land lost to erosion is essentially non-existent. The legal fiction is that the land may return and only then can claims be reasserted. Reclaiming that land takes a year at minimum, requiring affidavits, verification, and local authority endorsement. Those displaced often lack access to land records or support. The disconnect between environmental change and property law creates both administrative ambiguity and social insecurity.

There are no binding protocols for updating land records in response to environmental change.  Local officers, tahsildars, AC land, and ADCs are tasked with reconciling land records, ownership and taxes, without ingraining accelerated land loss into the existing administrative infrastructure.  The cadastral maps and deeds do not reflect what exists on the ground today. They have always been a challenge to work around, but if the current crisis does not call for a reform of this system, one can hope the impending emergency that can result from it, does not befall the country.  Moreover, disputes over ownership, inheritance, and compensation often go unresolved for years. Without state reform centring the potential of massive land loss, these tensions will only multiply. 

The instability of land boundaries also raises questions about national territory. The locations we know as part of the country can easily become indistinct. Unlike the Marshall Islands, Vanuatu, and Maldives, Bangladesh has not initiated serious discussion on long-term resettlement or territorial planning. These island nations, facing existential threats, are developing contingency models: relocating populations to larger islands, investing in land and housing abroad. Their approach accepts physical dispersal while preserving national identity through a digital meta-verse citizenship. In contrast, Bangladesh lacks such foresight. With a hostile neighbour like India, where the category of “Bangladeshi” is already politically charged – consigned to the weight of a termite – the Bangladeshi faces an existential threat in the region as land loss begins to take a toll.  

Internal electoral politics, too, is impacted. In Bangladesh, constituency boundaries are based on geographic and demographic data. As river erosion and land loss displace communities, the political maps remain outdated. People move, but their polling centres, legal addresses, and voter records remain tied to submerged or vanished locations distorting democratic representation. These gaps are not yet being addressed by the Election Commission or parliamentary review mechanisms. Yet, the ongoing reform menu shows little appetite to consider how climate displacement should reshape the electoral map, busying itself instead with Western theoretical discourses about hypothetical upper chambers and party-line votes (as if this is defied regularly in the US and the UK).

Bangladesh has, over time, built a reasonably effective system for disaster risk reduction, particularly for rapid-onset events like cyclones and floods. But this success has also created a narrow frame of action. Since land loss unfolds gradually, it fails to trigger the institutional reflexes of emergency response. Yet, the impacts are no less permanent. Land lost to the river or sea rarely returns in usable form. Consider cyclone-related deaths in the coastal zone: today, they are nearly zero compared to 1991. In this regard, the state, in partnership with development agencies, has centralised disaster as an “event” – a technical occurrence for which institutions prepare accordingly. But in doing so, a deeper crisis has taken shape: the severing of politics from the atmosphere, as if climate could be addressed separately from the body politic.

The urgency now is to recentre the environment as part of the everyday, not as a technical problem, which can be worked on the side, but as a constitutional and political concern. The state must confront what it means for its territory to shrink while its population continues to grow. Laws, records, elections, and institutions are still not incorporating the threat of climate change itself. Recognising land loss not just as erosion but as an erosion of governance, is the first step towards meaningful reform. 

If one thinks mainstreaming climate in politics might be too much for us to handle, history underlines its significance. Awami League’s big win in the 1970 general election has often been credited to the mismanagement of the 1970 cyclone by Pakistan’s military regime. Since then, treating disasters technically has made Bangladesh the laboratory for experiments. Why not acknowledge that climate is politics, and fully commit to politicising the issue of climate? Free the challenge of the climate tangle with good governance and elections.●

Saad Quasem is a lecturer in anthropology specialising in climate change at SOAS, University of London.