‘Climate-induced’ Rural-Urban Migration in Bangladesh: Experience of Migrants in Dhaka City

Climate-induced rural livelihood loss and consequent rural-urban migration is a common scenario in today's developing countries. However, little is currently known about the dynamics of the process of climate-displaced migration and the experiences of associated migrants. This is an attempt to understand how poor ‘climate-induced’ migrants perceive their urban conditions in hydro-geophysical and socio-economic terms. Dhaka City, the densely populated capital of Bangladesh, is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. In future a sustained influx of climate-induced migrants is likely to join the ranks of the urban poor, where they will have to face new hazards of city life. Therefore this research has tried to answer questions such as to what extent have the climate-induced migrants' aspirations been fulfilled after migration and whether their vulnerability to different hazards is different than that of the non-climate-induced migrants.

The research has termed them 'climate-induced migrants' who have migrated mainly due to problems of the type climate change is expected to cause; for example flood, cyclone, riverbank erosion, waterlogging, drought and salinity intrusion. Tracer survey and snowballing process were used to identify poor climate-induced migrants in Korail, one of the largest slums in Asia. Questionnaire surveys, focus groups and personal interviews were the main research methods. It argues that climatic factors never affected any other group so severely at both their origin and destination as it affected the poor climate-induced migrants. They face some hazards more severely than other types of migrants due to the differences in their financial and coping capacities and educational qualification. Finally the recently arrived illiterate female climate-induced migrants from a cyclone prone area have been identified as the most vulnerable population. With the rapid rate of urbanization and climate change, this is high time to identify such migrants and bring them under separate plans.