Climate change affects everyone. Yet it hits the poor hardest, especially women and children, and those without rights to land.

Landlessness and the lack of secure land tenure amplify the vulnerability of rural poor communities to the impacts of climate change. Yet, the challenges surrounding their lack of land access and insecure tenure rights are often overlooked in climate change discussions, policy-making, and program implementation.

This case study challenges assumptions that disaster-hit communities that have lost their houses and possessions would willingly pack up and leave, believing that it is easier to migrate than to remain in their communities. However, for indigenous people like the Munda in Shyamnagar sub-district, migration is not the answer to achieving climate resilience. Because their lives are inextricably linked to their ancestral home, uprooting themselves exacts a toll on their identity and undermines the continuity of their culture and traditions.

This case study shows the challenge of securing land rights and land tenure security among a sector of Bangladesh’s landless poor whose claim to land is among the most tenuous in the world — the char dwellers. Their settlement on land that was created by river erosion and could at any time disappear in the same way provides a compelling case for the grant by the government of land rights that are not presently provided for by current land laws. The increasing risk of disasters, particularly flooding, threatens char dwellers equally if not more than other landless poor.