Climate change events in the Bengali migration to the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

The internal migration of Bengali people to the CHT since the 1970s has been a significant factor in the long-standing ethnopolitical conflict in this region. The prevailing view is that while poverty and environmental disasters were push factors in this migration, government settlement programmes were primarily responsible for this population shift. This article offers a fresh perspective on this historic migration by exploring its environmental causes. It shows through an analysis of a questionnaire survey and interviews with Bengali settlers in the CHT that climatic events such as floods, cyclones, and riverbank erosion contributed to the migration decisions of the majority of the respondents. Government protection and provision of land and social networks in the CHT were mediating factors that enabled Bengali migrants to settle permanently in the CHT. This insight challenges the conventional narrative that the settlement was primarily politically motivated and confirms that complex migration motivations cannot be reduced to single drivers.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• climatic events
• internal migration
• mediating factors
• Bengali settlers
• Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT)
• Bangladesh

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Indigenous groups in the CHT are variously referred to as ‘tribes’ and ‘hill people’ in academic literature and in Bangladeshi public discourse. The Government of Bangladesh rejects the term ‘indigenous’ and instead uses the term ‘small ethnic communities’ in official discourse (Gerharz, 2014, p. 12).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rafiqul Islam

Md Rafiqul Islam is Associate Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. His research interests include peace, conflict, democracy, and development, and he recently completed his PhD on migration, climate change and conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.

Susanne Schech

Susanne Schech is a human geographer at Flinders University in South Australia. She is co-author of Culture and Development: A Critical Introduction (Wiley, 2000), editor of Development Perspectives from the Antipodes (Routledge, 2014), and has researched and published on a range of development issues including humanitarian migration, gender justice, poverty reduction and humanitarianism.

Udoy Saikia

Udoy Saikia is a social demographer at Flinders University in South Australia. His research focuses on population dynamics, human wellbeing and sustainable development. He has published over 50 articles, chapters, conference papers, and scholarly reports including the National Human Development Report: Timor-Leste (United Nations Publications 2018).