The Impact of Climate Change on Sundarbans : Implications for India-Bangladesh Relations

Contents: 1. Introduction. 2. Climate change: theoretical underpinnings. 3. The Sundarbans: understanding its ecological and socio-economic features. 4. Impact of climate change on Sundarbans. 5. Implications for India-Bangladesh relations. 6. Conclusion. Bibliography. Index. 

Sundarbans is the world’s largest mangrove ecosystem situated both in India and Bangladesh is on the verge of depletion because of the climate change. Several studies have focussed on the likely impact of climate change on ecology and biodiversity of the Sundarbans. However, this book attempts to study the likely impact of climate change in its entirety, which examines issues like loss of mangrove forest, salinity intrusion, coastal erosion, tidal inundation, livelihood conditions, socio-cultural ramification, cross-border security, displacement and illegal migration and refugee movement. This book also assesses how these critical issues will impinge upon India-Bangladesh relations.

India and Bangladesh have been characterized and distracted by numerous issues like illegal migration, water sharing, fundamentalism, and Bangladeshi fear of Indian hegemony. The issues induced by climate change have also added a new dimension to the bilateral relationship, particularly over issues such as the management of the Sundarbans area. Climate change could cause immense human insecurity that both countries are needed to address. More seriously, a situation of this nature has never occurred particularly in the context of geography-community-natural resources neutral character, and nature and impact of climate change. The intense and extensive bilateral relations between India and Bangladesh are going to be affected in a variety of new ways and means. How these two countries cope up with the situations is a big question that is also addressed by this study.