Thousands of climate migrants in Bangladesh are struggling to rebuild their lives in urban centres, facing unsafe housing, precarious employment, limited access to healthcare and education, and deep social exclusion, according to a report published by Pressenza International Press Agency. The findings come as tidal surges, cyclones, river erosion, and rising salinity continue to devastate homesteads across the country's coastal delta, driving mass displacement toward cities.

Scale of the Crisis

Bangladesh ranks among the world's most climate-vulnerable nations. Sea-level rise, frequent cyclones, severe river erosion, and a rapid expansion of salinity across the southern and southwestern coastal regions are continuously threatening the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. According to the report, this severe climate pressure is dismantling the rural economy and triggering a massive population shift toward urban centres — a trend experts warn has become one of the country's most pressing social and developmental challenges.

Experts cited in the report cautioned that policy frameworks and coordinated initiatives to protect the rights and security of climate migrants remain 'largely inadequate,' leaving displaced communities exposed and unsupported.

What Migrants Face in Cities

Once in cities, climate migrants find themselves caught in a cycle of vulnerability. They are frequently excluded from national social safety net programmes, according to journalist Sohrab Hasan, who spoke at a recent roundtable discussion. A critical structural barrier is the National Identity Card (NID) system: because migrants' NIDs still carry their permanent village addresses, they face bureaucratic hurdles and discrimination when attempting to access emergency public services, rations, or financial aid.

'No one leaves their hearth, home, and ancestral memories to move to a city by choice. It is a brutal decision forced upon them solely by the urge to survive,' Sohrab Hasan said at the event.

Roundtable Calls for Urgent Policy Action

The discussion was organised by Caritas Bangladesh at the Dhaka Reporters Unity (DRU) auditorium and brought together journalists, development workers, and media representatives. Participants called for the creation of an effective, comprehensive national policy for climate migrants and urged that the issue be highlighted with greater urgency in both national and international media.

Alexander Tripura, head of the Disaster Management Department at Caritas Bangladesh, argued that climate-vulnerable nations like Bangladesh are bearing the cost of unchecked carbon emissions by developed countries. Participants framed the migrant crisis explicitly as a matter of international climate justice, calling on the Bangladesh government to implement a coordinated national response.

The Broader Context

This comes amid growing global attention to climate-induced internal displacement, which the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has repeatedly flagged as an undercounted crisis in South Asia. Bangladesh's delta geography makes it disproportionately exposed: it sits at the confluence of three major river systems and absorbs roughly 80% of its landmass within low-lying floodplains. Notably, climate displacement in Bangladesh is not a future risk — it is an ongoing reality, and the policy gap identified at the roundtable reflects a broader failure to treat internal climate migrants with the same urgency as cross-border refugees.

Without a dedicated legal and administrative framework, experts warn, the humanitarian and social dimensions of this crisis will deepen further as climate pressures intensify in the years ahead.