Climate Migration and Urban Informality: Part 2

Published 11/22/2023 in Scholar Travel Stipend

Written by Ayan Rahman | 11/22/2023

This summer, I was able to continue my research in Dhaka, Bangladesh focusing on the issues pertaining to climate migration from rural to urban areas and the resulting urban informal settlements that have arisen because of such.

My research honed in on the social networks that existed within these settlements of climate refugees, specifically the various actors that played roles in the shaping of the residential experiences ranging from NGOs, to illegal landowners, to municipal agencies. I was able to continue to work with the International Center for Climate Change and Development and performed a ton of fieldwork, walking tours, and spoke to several wonderful representatives from NGOs.

Much of my trip was indeed informed by the mission statements put forward by the Milken Institute, especially as it pertained to maintaining focus on environmental health and tackling critical issues of global nature in developing blueprints for the future. My goal for this research was to highlight the experiences of the large influxes of climate migrants who experienced large social upheavals/land dispossessions as a result of climate induced environmental degradation in their original rural homes.

Climate migration is certainly not an isolated phenomenon in Bangladesh, or even just South Asia. This is something that many areas of the world are experiencing, and I found it exciting to be able to perform a case study on the social implications of climate change in Dhaka. With this in mind, I thought this project would be perfect in promoting the goals of developing urban resilience/contingency planning that would speak to social phenomena resulting from contemporary, global climate issues that many parts of the world are facing.

While in Bangladesh, I conducted several walking tours and was able to speak with NGO representatives from both the International Center for Climate Change and Development and Nogor Bostibashi Unnyan Sangstha (NBUS), or, as translated to English, the Urban Slum Development Agency. From both of these interactions, I was able to surmise some aspects of the social experiences within urban informal settlements that many climate migrants are moving into, before actually speaking to migrants themselves. Mohammad Hannan Akondo, from NBUS spoke to me a lot about social relations within informal settlements, and about the interplays between various stakeholders within climate migrant settlements and the sorts of implications those bore for adequate access to infrastructure and resources for these residents. For example, he spoke to me about illegal landowners and how they limited access to resources such as electricity, water, and sanitation while upcharging residents for what was actually available to them. Moreover, while the roles that his NGO, and many others of the like, played within these settlements was to provide resources to fill gaps in access to resources like health care, education, etc. inner conflicts with illegal landowners and municipal agencies often stifled these efforts.

I was able to conduct walking tours and collect data in the form of 360 degrees footage of my fieldwork within a number of informal settlements including the Kallyanpur Pora Basti, Korail, and more. While collecting visual materials depicting lacking infrastructures and increased population densities within these spaces, I was also able to collect interview responses from NGO research team members from the program I was working with at the International Center for Climate Change and Development.

Again, this time around, I was able to work with Lutfor Rahman and another researcher named Farhin Rahman Reeda. While discussing these awesome field work specialists, I was able to shadow them as they conducted surveys assessing resident access to resources like water and sanitation. It was evident both in my observations of their work and in our conversations that building a case for greater urban resilience was a core goal of theirs as was of the research I was conducting. We all agreed that a certain expected ephemerality to settlements has cropped up among municipal structures, but several aspects of social community building and large retention rates of these settlements have made it such that these communities are permanent hosts to climate migrants and severely lack the infrastructure to continually support influxes of populations coming in with the global climate problem ramping up year after year.

Getting to perform this research has once again allowed me to connect my academic work to the goals, objectives, and missions of the Milken Institute in a profound way. I am preparing to aggregate the data that I have collected from this study and the travel from December 2022 to put together a thesis investigating and calling for greater urban resilience measures in the wake of global trends of climate change. Much like last time, in tapping into the Milken Scholars program initiatives of building leadership to better the world through service– my work will allow me to contribute knowledge and research to improving conditions for and amplifying the narratives of climate migrants in Dhaka. My thesis will be a large project around 60-80 pages in length. In it, I will be detailing my observations in Dhaka, beginning with the spatial dimensions of informal settlements –answering questions such as what are the social networks that arise in the built environment of refugee settlements? What are the infrastructures or lack thereof? Using the 360 footage I was able to collect during my time in Dhaka from my walking tours will really allow me to create a visual analysis of life within these spaces for readers, in a way that hasn’t been done before. Using this as a backbone, I will be able to have my readers, already well versed in the sights, scenes, and senses associated with being within a climate refugee community, better integrated within the later conversations on the social dynamics of these spaces and the aspects of infrastructural, economic, and social inequality facing residents of the settlements. From here, I’ll be citing the numerous NGO folks that I’ve gotten the chance to work with and really draw out the narratives of settlement dwellers to accurately portray the experiences of climate refugees; making a case grounded in specific forms of urban resilience that I’d urge municipalities in Dhaka to embrace. Truly, much of this work reinforces the ideals of the Milken Institute in a number of different ways, and I hope these bottom-up approaches to showcasing climate refugee experiences will open up larger conversations pertaining to global climate and urban resilience.