Purposeful and Coordinated: Climate Change and Managed Retreat in India

This transcript was generated using AI and may contain inaccuracies. If you notice an error, feel free to email [email protected].

CHAPTERS 

[00:03:10]: India's 7,500 km coastline and exposure of cyclones and flooding 

[00:04:04]: The Sundarbans: population pressures and environmental change 

[00:07:49]: Land loss and delayed relocation in vulnerable coastal areas 

[00:11:15]: What is managed retreat—and how does it work in practice? 

[00:14:09]: Why communities resist relocation despite climate risks 

[00:18:00]: Evaluating managed retreat: gaps between policy and implementation 

[00:19:15]: International approaches: lessons from Kiribati and New Zealand 

[00:21:22]: Climate-related relocation as an emerging policy challenge 

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:03.13] 

Hello and welcome back to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. This is a podcast from the Migration Policy Institute that looks at different ways that climate change is impacting migration and human movement around the world. I'm Julian Hattem, your host and the editor of MPI's online journal, the Migration Information Source, and we're publishing a special series on climate migration. In that series and in this podcast, we are diving deep into the intersection of climate change and migration and trying to explain how things are changing now and what will happen in the future. For this episode I want to focus in on one particular area and talk about some of the changes going on there. South Asia and the Indian subcontinent are sometimes considered to be among the places that are most vulnerable to severe weather events, which means that year after year large numbers of people are being displaced and are moving to avoid some of these threats. And in response, the government has taken steps to move entire communities from one area to another. Joining me today to talk about this in much greater detail is Architesh Panda. He is a research officer at the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics which focuses on climate change.

[00:01:18.05] 

And he has done a lot of research on effects of climate change in Asia and South Asia in particular. He has also written a very interesting case study for our online journal about India and climate change, which you can read online. Archie, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:01:34.09] 

Thank you.

[00:01:36.03] 

So let's start by outlining some of the context, what sorts of climate events or changes are happening in India and how do these compare with what's going on other places in the world?

[00:01:48.03] 

Yes, I think we all know that South Asia is one of the most vulnerable region to the impacts of climate change, along with other countries like Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka which are in the top 10 vulnerable countries to climate change in the world. Along with that, India also India has a big geography and it's quite diverse and we have a lot of socio ecological and other conditions existing in the country. So India is hit by like cyclones and typhoons are very common in the country and it's also being impacted by large floods and regular droughts in large parts of India. And the recent studies, some of the recent studies on climate change that has come out has shown that especially in the case of extreme precipitation events which are on the rise in large parts of India, especially if you look at the multi day deluge that lead to large scale floods are slowly increasing in India. And apart from floods also we have warmer temperature which are speeding up the glacier meltings in the Himalayas which is also projected to increase in the future. Like especially in the case of large rivers like Ganges in the Brahmaputra in the east of India.

[00:02:59.15] 

So India is one of the most vulnerable country to the impacts of climate change, largely due to its big geography and diverse ecological condition existing in the country. And also India has a long coastline, like around 7,516 km of long coastline we have in India. So every year it's facing with cyclones and typhoons. So it's quite common. And yes. So India is one of the most vulnerable countries to the impacts of climate change.

[00:03:30.20] 

And I know within you mentioned India is very large and diverse geographically. If we want to zoom in on one area in particular, you mentioned eastern India, especially the Sundarbans, which is a large watery mangrove delta on the India Bangladesh border. That's an area that has been, that has gotten a lot of focus on some of the research on climate change and some of the impacts there. Right. What can you say about what's going on there and how people there are impacted by climate change or how many people are impacted by climate change?

[00:04:02.23] 

Yes. So Sundarban Delta, which is one of the largest delta in the world and which is India and Bangladesh, both shares the Sundarban Delta along the Bay of Bengal, which is the world's largest continuous mangrove forest. And it's also home to a wide variety of species. And if you look at the populations, nearly about 7.5 million people who live in the region, they span from both India in this side to the Bangladesh on the other side. And with the impacts of climate change, we know that the global sea level is rising because of climate change impacts. And according to the scientific projections, it can increase as much as 23 inches in this century by the end of this century if we don't really control the global emissions. And on the other hand, if let's say we make significant efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, so the sea level rise is still likely to rise around likely to rise till 15 inches by the end of the century. So on the one hand in this worst case scenario, which is like 59 centimeters or 23 inches, and on the other hand 15 inches or 38 centimeters by the end of the century.

[00:05:17.07] 

So in either case we are stuck in this impacts of climate change already. So this is going to have a big impact on this part of the world, which is Sundarban, which is a also an global biodiversity hotspot, where as I told like nearly 7.5 million people from both India and India and Bangladesh live there. They are dependent on the forest, the natural resources and other, other services. That's services that Sundarban is providing to them. So sea level rise is going to have a big impact on the Sundarban. And if you again look at the scientific projections, it says that if we don't really do anything now on climate change, the whole Sundarban is likely to be inundated by mid century or by the end of the century. So it's really yours.

[00:06:09.17] 

And so with, we've talked in previous episodes about the distinction between fast onset events like, like typhoons and hurricanes which you mentioned are a threat to this part of the world and also slower onset events like sea level rise which is also, it seems like a threat to this part of the world. So really the Sundarban Delta is kind of getting hit from both sides, right? I mean, how is that, what are people doing in response? Are people, the seven and a half million people who live there, are they moving of their own volition? I mean what, what kind of impact happens in resolve? What do people do in response to some of those threats?

[00:06:44.21] 

Yes, so in both side of the Sundarban Delta, in this side India and the other side Bangladesh, one of the major impact has been that people are migrating from the risk, risk prone areas like regular floods and with regular cyclones in the, in the place people have started migrating. Oh well, it's not a new phenomenon. It has been there since last many decades or decades or let's say in the last century. But due to the impacts of climate change now the rate of migration has increased from this area. And on the top of that there are few places where in the last three or four decades the islands. We all know that Sundarban is a kind of, it's a kind of conglomeration of a lot of islands here and there. So there are a lot of small islands in this, in the whole Sundarban area. And in the last four or five decades because of the impacts of climate change and related sea level rise, a lot of this, quite a few of these small islands have vanished already from the, from the, from the geography. So let's say, let's focus in India. So at least three islands that existed a century ago which were covered in many groups, namely it's called Lohachara, Suparibhanga and Bedford.

[00:08:00.01] 

These three islands from the Indian side have vanished and, and other islands like the Sagar island which is on, also on the Indian side had shrunk by 20 square miles since the mid 20th century.

[00:08:14.09] 

Huh. And people are living on these Islands like this is where people would have been living in the past.

[00:08:19.10] 

Yes. The three island I told like Lohachara, Suparibhanga and Bedford, it's already under the sea now. Yeah, but in that I think in the 80s or 70s some people were relocated to Sagar island in effect of the government policies because the, because the sea level was quite creeping and people are facing a lot of problems because of sea level rise, let's say soil salinity. So the agriculture was being affected. So some people in the mid-70s were shifted from other islands to Sagar island which at that point they thought that is going to really solve the problem by shifting the people from this place to the, the safe island nearby which is Sagar Island. But then over the last two decades this island itself is also sinking.

[00:09:05.03] 

You see, it's tragic. Yeah, it's like. Yeah, yeah, it's awful.

[00:09:08.16] 

And in some parts of Sundarbad the sea is really advancing about 180 meters a year.

[00:09:14.10] 

Oh wow. So it's really. The sea is really encroaching in and as you mentioned the soil salinity. So it's not. So the sea is rising but at the same time the soil is becoming yet less productive or difficult to grow. The same kind of agricultural things it sounds like.

[00:09:29.21] 

Yes, because a lot of people are like they are dependent on the whole natural system of Sundarbans. It's not only the sea level rise, it's also the impact that it's bringing like let's say regular floods. So the households which are staying along the coast, they face regular floods. They can't really do any more fishing, they can't do agriculture, cannot do agriculture because of soil salinity in the agricultural fields. So. So tens of millions of people in the low laying areas of South Asia, so they are being frauded annually. And India and Bangladesh in this case are particularly susceptible to the increasing salinity of water resources especially in the Gyanja and Brahmaputra basin.

[00:10:09.07] 

And so you talked about this government effort to relocate people from one island to another. This is a concept called managed retreat or planned relocation. How does that work? Can you walk me through some of the logistics of what happened? I mean who makes the decisions?

[00:10:27.19] 

Yes, so managed retreat, as we are telling now, it's not really very old. It's a new word coined very recently, not really old. So over the last two decades or three decades we have seen that migration has become one of the most having negative impacts on the people. As we discussed in the case of India or Bangladesh. And as per the World bank studies, only in Bangladesh More than 30 million people who are on the margins of Sundarban, they might migrate because of climate related crisis. So in this context we have been talking about this concept called managed retreat where we relocate people from risky zones to a safer place completely. And in most of the cases this is called managed retreat because it's purposeful and coordinated movement of people. So that's why it's called managed retreat. And it's not really new, very new. We have seen that from many centuries when there is a flood, people usually tend to do. What they tend to do is they just go to a upland place from the place where they are facing floods. But in this case, because of the high impact of climate change, sea level rise and inundation of the, of these places, the risks are so much high that people have to be relocated completely because you don't have any other choice.

[00:11:55.05] 

If the land is no more there then how people are going to live. So managed retreat in this case is a, it can refer to a purposeful and coordinated movement of people from the risky areas to a safe place.

[00:12:09.22] 

And who does this like the coordination? Who's in charge of planning? Okay, Village X. You need to move from this island to that island. Is that a government effort or is it like the national government, a local government, NGOs, the community itself? I mean, how does it work?

[00:12:25.14] 

Well, in many cases, like when you talk about managed it, it usually involves some kind of government's regulation or government intervention because you can't really shift people from one place to another by, by your own, because it involves the, involves the questions of land rights, their livelihoods and things like this. So in, in many of the, in most of the cases till now, not only in India, if you look at around the globe like places like New Zealand, places like the islands of the Pacific islands, where some kinds of, some types of managed it has already happened. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's the government who is really involved in this is in these cases mostly.

[00:13:10.09] 

And does it work? I guess what are the impacts or the repercussions of this kind of strategy? I assume that some of the people who are being encouraged to move, there's probably some pushback, right. If the government came and said you have told me you have to leave your house, maybe where you've lived and your family has lived for generations, there might, I can imagine there could be some resistance.

[00:13:31.05] 

Right?

[00:13:31.13] 

Or is there embracing of that because people realize that things are no longer sustainable. And I guess, yeah, what's the reaction from people, from communities and households on the ground?

[00:13:40.19] 

Well, so in this case, like we know that when people have stayed in a place for like centuries, let's say over the last two centuries, they've been staying there, they are earning their own livelihoods, they have a culture there, they have attachment to the place there. So it's not really easy when the government tells them, okay, see, the climate change impacts are increasing and this place might not be here physically if you keep staying here for longer and you have to move. But in this case, in many of the cases, for example, in India itself, so these people who are, in most cases, they are really poor, who are staying on this fragile areas and earning their livelihood, they are poor and they are quite attached to the place. In case of India, they say, I can give you the example of the coastal state of Odisha in the, in the east, where there is an example that people have been relocated from the coast to an inland area. So they were telling that till the time the God of the village is being not relocated, we are not going to leave this place. So they are quite attached to the place.

[00:14:45.23] 

But at the end they have to move from the, from the place because there is, they have no choice. So there has been repercussions, there has been pushbacks from the people that they don't want to go. But, but, but over the time they have, they have to do it.

[00:14:59.15] 

Yeah. What kind of strategies has the government or do people take or what kind of strategies exist to help facilitate that movement? Is it just eventually people will realize that it's no longer sustainable? Is, are there like financing that can go along with that? I mean, how do you convince someone to do something that it seems like might no longer be sustainable, but which they don't necessarily want to do because they have such connection to the land and the place and their home?

[00:15:27.12] 

It's a mix of both over the years. It's the learning curve of people from the increasing impacts of disaster that they realize themselves that it's no longer feasible or it's no longer viable to stay in the place and earn or leave the same kind of life they used to live. So it's both from the increasing impacts of climate change and also the role of government which is trying to push them and tell them, okay, it's no longer really feasible to live here and you should leave the place. So it's kind of both ways. It's working.

[00:15:58.14] 

And do we know, have we learned either from India or from other contexts which I want to discuss a little bit in a second. Are there specific strategies that tend to work best in certain cases? I mean what, what are the lessons learned I guess from, from the history of managed retreat and how that can or maybe cannot be used to manage these situations?

[00:16:19.05] 

Yes, as we discussed earlier that managed retreat is quite new and it's, it's really too early to judge the, whether the, the, the managed retreat plants are successful or not because in most of the cases in low and middle income countries at least, so it's very new to them. We have this concept of plant relocation earlier. Let's say for example in the case of dams, we know that we have built a large dams or medium sized dams in the last half century to, to build up the infrastructure and generate power. Where we had cases where we used to relocate people from one place to another. But in this case it's quite different. It's not really the case of dams and plant relocation of the people. It's about climate change. So the context is different and it's quite new for the low income and middle income countries to deal with managed relocation. So as of now we don't find much policies specifically targeting managed retreat. We have policies in the context of disaster management, let's say we have policies in the context of, let's say coastal zone management. But these policies are kind of here and there, they are not really integrated in one place to really look into the question of managed retreat and the relocation of people.

[00:17:40.19] 

And for example, in the case of Orissa, which is in the east coast, as I told earlier, which is a cyclone prone state and very often it faces cyclone and devastating cyclones every year. But over the years they have developed this capacity of disaster management. And also it has been mentioned by many global organizations as one of the most successful cases of disaster, disaster management. So this kind of learning curve is there, but there is no specific policies till now to deal with managed data. It's mostly, mostly the initiatives by the local government. India is a federal state, we know and we have different states in different parts. So it's, it's. Until now it's depends on the federal states themselves to take the initiative and manage the relocation of the people. So there is no central government policies on that. So yes, so that's the context.

[00:18:36.21] 

And you mentioned New Zealand. Some places in the Pacific have also explored similar kinds of policies. I mean, how do you, you mentioned that managed retreat is a relatively new phenomenon or new concept. I mean, how is it growing or what countries are exploring things in line with this and how I guess what part, what role do you think these kinds of policies will play going forward? If as seems to be the case, the impacts of climate change are going to continue to be more extreme, driving or influencing people's movement away from places

[00:19:10.03] 

where they currently live? Well, as I told like there are cases like low lying Pacific island, let's say I can give the example of Kiribati which has brought land in Fiji to allow future migration from that island to there. So in New Zealand as well there are, there has been cases not only not in the context of particularly sea level rise, but they have the context of earthquake in New Zealand for the the people have been, were forced to relocate from one place to another. And as I told the Fiji also there have been cases that it has brought a land, Kiribati has brought land in Fiji to allow future migration. So this thing are slowly evolving. But if you look at the impacts of climate change for the, let's say for the next half century or by the end of the century, there are high chances that many people are going to have to be relocated from these risky zones to risk areas to safe places. So it's going to increase in the next, by the end of this century or let's say in the next coming decades and the governments will have no option but to choose managed retreat because we are already locked to a certain level of climate impacts.

[00:20:26.24] 

So basically these changes are going to happen whether governments like it or not. And it probably makes more sense for some of these governments to acknowledge it, coordinate and focus on these movements and changes to prepare. It sounds like both the host communities in which people are moving and also the migrants, the people who will be moving away from climate affected regions.

[00:20:50.23] 

Yes, exactly. So it's a policy instrument which is quite challenging. Let's say it requires significant community buying in acceptance and planning to ensure that it puts those at risk on a new and more sustainable development paths like for example in the case the people who are being relocated. So it's kind of evolving policies and as we discussed it's kind of last resort. But with the increasing impact of climate change it's going to be more reality rather than choice because we don't have any choice left to rather than relocating people from one place to other.

[00:21:33.06] 

That's fascinating. I think unfortunately that about comes to our time but we covered a lot of ground here and I learned a lot and I think there's a lot. It seems like this is certainly a growing policy response and one that I think we'll probably see more of and the case of India is really an interesting one that offers a lot of lessons both for that region and for the broader world. So, Archie, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

[00:21:59.18] 

Yeah, thanks for talking. Yeah, thank you very much.

[00:22:03.08] 

Architesh Panda is a research Officer at the LSE's Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. There are a lot of ways that people react and move in the face of climate change. What's happening in India with managed retreat is one example, but there are still a lot of policy levers to explore. In many cases, we still don't entirely know what works and what doesn't. But as Archie demonstrated, a lot of people are going to be affected by climate events in the future, and there is a lot at stake in helping them manage their situations. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. Stay updated with every episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts or by subscribing through your preferred podcast app. And please leave us a review as well. You can read an article from Architesh about what's happening in coastal India, as well as other analysis about climate migration online at migrationpolicy.org/climate and this episode was brought to you by Lisa Dixon and Kenia Guerrero with special help from Michelle Mittelstadt. The music that you have heard is called Touch by Patrick Patrikios. My name is Julian Hattem. Thanks for listening.

[00:23:24.19] 

Hope to see you next time.