Paper short abstract:

This paper complicates the idea of Bangladesh as a climate change 'victim' and looks at the economic rationale of embankments and their highly negative ecological effects. It argues that climate change discourse ignores processes of anthropogenic environmental degradation and exacerbates vulnerability.

Paper long abstract:

Bangladesh's densely populated, low-lying land is often portrayed as vulnerable to climate change through rising sea levels and the predicted increase in the frequency and intensity of cyclones. This paper seeks to demonstrate how this simplified climate change narrative fails to comprehend the multitude of interlinked processes affecting livelihoods in Bangladesh's coastal zone. It combines ethnography with archival research to create a historically informed conceptualisation of economic development, its environmental impact and the ways in which it negatively affects poorer societal groups (See Greenough and Tsing 2003). It argues that recent donor efforts to protect Bangladesh from rising sea levels through flood protection infrastructure such as embankments are misguided. Rather, the expansion of embankments would only intensify existing environmental problems of siltation, waterlogging and floods (See Auerbach et al. 2015). As political ecologists point out, "Environmental degradation is not an unfortunate accident under advanced capitalism, it is instead a part of the logic of that economic system" (Peet, Robbins, and Watts 2011, 26). This paper seeks to complicate the notion of Bangladesh as a climate change 'victim' by looking at the economic rationale of embankments and their highly negative ecological effects. It concludes that current meta-discourses of climate change ignore processes of anthropogenic environmental degradation, thus exacerbating vulnerability to disasters and furthering socio-economic inequality.