Flooding, displacement, and refugee camp governance in Bangladesh

Flooding in Bangladesh is no longer an occasional disaster. It is a governing condition of life. Each year, water determines who can stay, who must move, and who is quietly pushed out of place altogether. In a country where more than 80% of the land lies on floodplains and deltas, climate change is turning a familiar environmental rhythm into a relentless displacement machine.

Bangladesh is one of the most flood-exposed countries on earth. On average, around 20–25% of the country is flooded every year; during severe monsoon seasons, that figure can rise to over 60%. In 2022 alone, floods affected more than 7.2 million people in Bangladesh, damaging over 1 million homes and displacing hundreds of thousands internally. These are not one-off shocks. Families are displaced repeatedly, often every few years, as land erodes, homes collapse, and livelihoods disappear.

Globally, flooding is now the single largest driver of disaster-related displacement. Over the past decade, an average of roughly 24 million people per year have been displaced by disasters, with floods responsible for nearly half. In 2023, flooding triggered close to 10 million displacements worldwide. As Dr Hawker, Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol, notes, the danger is not simply the number of people affected, but the fact that displacement is increasingly cyclical, the same communities are hit again and again, with fewer resources each time to recover.

Bangladesh makes this pattern stark. Along rivers such as the Jamuna, Padma, and Meghna, flooding has always shaped settlement. As Dr Jan Freihardt, Lecturer at ETH Zurich, explains, communities historically adapted to seasonal floods that replenished soil and supported agriculture. Flooding itself was not the enemy. Climate change has altered the balance. Rainfall has become more erratic, flood peaks higher, and riverbank erosion more aggressive. Entire villages now vanish permanently as land collapses into the river, removing not just homes but legal claims to land.

Dr Freihardt’s fieldwork along the Jamuna River reveals how displacement is governed unevenly. Some villages are protected by embankments; others are left exposed. The difference is rarely environmental. It is political. Protection depends on whether local representatives successfully secure funds. When land is lost, the government’s ‘one house, one plot’ programme offers limited relief, but land scarcity means many households are excluded. Those families do not simply rebuild elsewhere; they drift toward towns, cities, or informal settlements, carrying the status of displaced people without recognition or support.

For many Bangladeshis, migration is not opportunity but exhaustion. People often resist moving to cities such as Dhaka until survival becomes impossible. Urban areas promise income, but deliver overcrowding, air pollution, informal labour, and new flood risks. Dhaka itself floods regularly, for 4-months annually. At the same time, millions cannot move at all. Poverty, debt, family obligations, and lack of alternatives trap people in high-risk zones, where each flood strips away more assets and resilience.

Refugee camps expose the governance failures most clearly. Bangladesh hosts nearly 1 million Rohingya refugees, most living in Kutupalong, the largest refugee camp in the world. The camp is built on deforested hillsides with shelters made of bamboo and tin, highly vulnerable to flooding and landslides. It was never designed for long-term habitation, yet eight years on it remains a permanent temporary solution. Residents have no political rights, limited mobility, and little control over their environment. The relocation of refugees to Bhasan Char, a low-lying, flood-prone island, has been widely criticised for transferring people from one hazard zone to another under the banner of management.

What is happening in Bangladesh is echoed globally. In Indonesia, Jakarta continues to flood as the city sinks, despite plans for massive sea walls. By mid-2024, only around 13 kilometres of a planned 50-kilometre barrier had been completed, and flooding persists even where walls exist. In East Africa, El Niño-driven rains in 2024 displaced more than 480,000 people, including refugees living in camps already exposed to flood risk. In Brazil, catastrophic floods in Rio Grande do Sul displaced over half a million people in weeks. Different contexts, same outcome: displacement governed by emergency response, not long-term planning.

Both Dr Freihardt and Dr Hawker stress that humanitarian aid alone cannot solve this. Emergency relief keeps people alive, but it does not reduce risk. Without structural change, planned relocation from high-risk zones, equitable access to land, and governance systems that reduce inequality, flooding will continue to produce camps, slums, and chronic displacement. Large-scale engineering solutions imposed without local input often fail or deepen inequality, cutting communities off from livelihoods while protecting wealthier areas.

Flooding is redrawing Bangladesh in real time. This is not a future warning; it is a present crisis affecting millions. The danger lies not only in rising water, but in systems that treat displacement as temporary, manageable, and peripheral. When flooding becomes permanent, ignoring governance is no longer neutral. It is a decision that shapes who is allowed to stay, who must move, and who is left with nowhere safe to go.

Further information and opportunities to engage with organisations working in this area are listed below:
https://www.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam-in-action/current-emergencies/bangladesh-floods-appeal/
https://oneummah.org.uk/appeals/bangladesh-emergency-appeal
https://www.actionaid.org.uk/our-work/emergencies-disasters-humanitarian-response/bangladesh-floods

Share This Article

What's Your Opinion?

Share your thoughts on this article