The dominant international development narrative largely regards climate change as an external, class-neutral physical shock (a shared geographical disaster) which is then addressed through technocratic governance, carbon offsets and voluntary aid. In Bangladesh the donor funded policy frameworks will always be about reducing environmental vulnerability to a set of macroeconomic indicators: sea level rise, frequency of extreme weather events and total GDP loss. That’s the liberal environmental consensus in action and it operates on the quiet assumption that climate adaptation is just a technical problem to be solved through investment in capital, infrastructure and awareness raising for the poor.
This entire analytical framework is in fact flawed. Climate vulnerability in Bangladesh is not some sort of equal opportunity environmental disaster. The number on your weather app is the temperature outside. The one that matters in my research is the temperature inside. Start with the roof. Many homes are a room or two under corrugated tin. When researchers placed sensors in 44 homes across five Dhaka slums, they recorded indoor temperatures as high as 47.2°C in houses with tin roofs and walls. Now put a stove in that room. In the communities I studied, cooking is women’s work, and heat does not cancel dinner. So, she cooks, standing or sitting beside the flame for hours, in a body already struggling to cool itself. The heat illness documented in this research is no freak accident. It is simply what feeding a family costs on a hot day. Some of these women are pregnant, making this perhaps the most difficult reality to state plainly. A pregnant woman at that stove carries her child’s exposure along with her own. A review of 70 studies in The BMJ found that the odds of preterm birth rose about five percent for every extra degree Celsius, and sixteen percent during heatwaves. All six studies that compared women by socioeconomic status found the link strongest in lower-income women. Bangladesh’s estimated preterm birth rate in 2020, 16.2 percent, was the highest in the world. Heat is only one cause among many, but it is one we can plan for. The child did nothing. Neither, really, did the mother. Bangladesh produces less than one percent of global emissions, and a woman cooking in Korail produces almost none. The bill for the carbon arrived at her door anyway. A recent study of Bangladeshi children link extreme heat in the first thousand days, counted from pregnancy, to stunting. The loss surfaces later, in classrooms and in wages, long after anyone remembers the heatwave.
It is a violent distributional conflict which is mediated through class, through spatial enclosure and through the exploitation of gendered labour. Climate change doesn’t just occur in a political vacuum. It occurs within a political economy which is already one of extreme concentration of wealth, in which reproductive labour is largely unremunerated and in which the agrarian poor are already dispossessed.
The rich in Dhaka can afford to privatise their thermal survival (buying air conditioning in their cars, in their high rises, in their commercial offices etc) whereas the poor are the ones who end up bearing the full brunt of a warming world in terms of physical, biological and economic cost as unremunerated ambient labour. Thermal comfort has become a paid subscription and thermal stress is the unremunerated ambient labour of the poor. If we are to understand why climate policy in Bangladesh continues to fail the most vulnerable then we need to get rid of the technocratic top down rhetoric and look at the structural mechanisms of thermal inequality through the combined lens of Marxist political economy, legal institutionalism and socialist feminist theory of social reproduction.
In high density metropolitan Dhaka temperature is an index of class power. The built environment is the instrument of thermal segregation, dividing the population into those who can afford thermal protection and those whose bodily limits are simply extracted in the process of sustaining urban capital accumulation.
This is a contemporary form of thermal enclosure. In the context of urban capital accumulation space is privatised not just in the sense of land ownership but through the privatisation of the microclimate. The energy-intensive commercial centres, elite residential towers, and sub-22°C internal temperatures all emit a massive amount of waste heat into the surrounding public realm. The thermal comfort of the propertied is thus in a direct dialectical relationship to the thermal degradation of the public space around them.
For the working class (street vendors, rickshaw pullers, waste pickers, construction workers, garment workers etc) heat is the mechanism by which surplus value is directly extracted. A construction worker working in 40°C heat in the afternoon or a garment worker working 11 hours a day on an unventilated factory floor are both working beyond the metabolic limits of the human body. The enterprise takes the production quota and the long term biological cost (cellular damage, organ stress, chronic dehydration, premature physical exhaustion etc) is all paid for by the worker.
When worker productivity is compromised by heat exhaustion the liberal policy response is to provide hydration points and short breaks. That’s just managing the symptoms of the worker’s body being under strain. The underlying economic relationship is unchanged in that the worker’s body is still an uncompensated heat sink for capital. The extraction of that heat doesn’t cease at the end of the shift either; it continues with the worker into the home.
A huge blind spot in municipal climate planning across the Global South is the continued focus on outdoor environmental conditions. National heat action plans are based solely on ambient temperature readings from regional meteorological stations and are completely blind to the very different and often far more hazardous indoor microclimates that prevail in the homes of the poor.
In high density informal settlements like Basumati slum, there is corrugated tin roofing, uninsulated masonry and high occupancy which creates thermodynamic heat traps. During the heatwaves in Dhaka the tin roofs get baked by the sun and the longwave radiation is trapped inside the dwellings where there is absolutely no air movement. The end result is that indoor temperatures in the low income homes will be 3 to 6 degrees above the reported ambient outdoor temperature and you’ll have a high level of thermal stress right through to after the sun has set.
To assess the consequences of this indoor heat trap we need to apply social reproduction theory. Capitalist production is based upon the constant cycle of social reproduction (the day to day and intergenerational reproduction of human life via the provision of food, cleaning, care and emotional labour). Under the gendered division of labour this reproductive work is almost entirely the responsibility of women and is largely unpaid.
Extreme indoor heat acts as an uncompensated biological tax extracted directly from working-class women:
- In a 42°C tin enclosure the physical 42 degrees of domestic work are doubled. Women are required to stand over indoor biomass or gas stoves, which create local cooking microclimates of over 45°C. The water requirements for cooking, for sanitation and for bodily cooling are tripled and this in turn requires women to spend additional hours each day carrying the heavy water pitchers from the municipal taps some distance away.
- Food spoilage and nutritional sacrifice. Without refrigeration ambient heat will rapidly spoil the household food stocks. When those stocks spoil, the women are the ones who go without food so that the children and the income earning men get their calories. This results in very high rates of maternal micronutrient deficiency and anaemia.
- Maternal physiology and intergenerational depletion: chronic exposure to extreme indoor heat during pregnancy results in heat induced placental ischaemia, increased risk of pre-eclampsia, low birth weight and infant stunting.
The indoor heat trap is a site of structural violence rather than a private domestic issue. Capitalist urban development depends on women’s unpaid care work to keep the workforce going and the climate-induced thermal stress is increasing the biological cost of that work without any state protection or infrastructure to compensate.
The thermal enclosure of Dhaka cannot be understood in isolation from the ecological collapse of the rural periphery of Bangladesh. The movement of working class families into the urban informal settlements is a direct consequence of the environmental devastation which has occurred in the coastal districts of Satkhira, Khulna and Bhola.
When you have hyper-salinity, storm surges and long periods of agricultural heatwaves destroying the arable land then agricultural production collapses. Smallholder farming and agricultural wage labour become untenable and household income falls below the baseline level of subsistence, resulting in households being in a state of acute asset depletion.
It’s exactly at the point of agrarian collapse, climate induced poverty and the patriarchal property arrangements that we see the early spikes in forced child marriage.
Mainstream development discourse and the usual liberal human rights NGOs will quite frequently get the diagnosis wrong when it comes to early forced marriage in the climate vulnerable areas. They’ll see it as a feudal cultural flaw or a simple lack of awareness and their standard response is to go in and run awareness workshops for the parents in the village telling them what the legal age is.
This approach completely fails to grasp the underlying economic reality. In a broken down agrarian economy child marriage is a mechanism of risk mitigation (a desperate form of asset reallocation) in the face of total state failure.
When a smallholder family loses land through riverbank erosion or crop failure, their household food security is destroyed. In a patriarchal socio-legal system where there are very few employment opportunities for women in the formal sector, the girl child is economically redefined as a household liability rather than as a person with rights. Marrying off a young daughter is a way of removing a mouth to feed, removing the direct cost of her maintenance and securing a male guardian, thereby reducing the risk of gender based violence in any temporary shelter.
Child marriage in climate-impacted Bangladesh is an economic shock absorber for agrarian collapse. Top-down moral messaging is ineffective in this context, as it tells families to maintain social norms while completely ignoring the material destitution that drives their actions. When the state provides no disaster safety net, no social protection floor, the physical freedom, the education and the health of the young girl are all sacrificed in order to absorb the loss of the land.
When state institutions and the various multilateral agencies are dealing with these overlapping crises they almost invariably resort to the same top down technocratic approach. The Bangladesh National Adaptation Plan (NAP 2023-2050) and the various international instruments under the UNFCCC are essentially based on market-based climate finance, physical infrastructure (coastal embankments, etc.), and voluntary non-state aid.
From a legal point of view, these legal/institutional mechanisms are structurally flawed because they rely on voluntary, non-binding commitments that treat climate damages as externalities in the context of development rather than as strict legal liabilities.
The UNFCCC Loss and Damage Fund is in effect a pot of ad hoc aid. It’s a mechanism whereby transfers of resources from the historic carbon emitting countries are packaged up as international assistance rather than as compensation for extraterritorial civil wrongs. That enables the historic industrial emitters to privatise their profits and pass the physical cost of climate change onto the Global South.
Domestically the state policy is that of top down technocracy. The climate budget is being channeled into large engineering contracts (dikes, cyclone shelters, roads) which of course opens the door to all sorts of political corruption and capital capture. The actual indoor thermal environment, the unpaid care work and the economic drivers of displacement are not part of the municipal planning process.
Liberal legalism treats rights as purely formal, abstract guarantees. Articles 31 and 32 of the Constitution of Bangladesh enshrine the right to life and the right to legal protection. In reality though, when a working class woman has a heat stroke in a corrugated iron hut, or when a young girl is forced into early marriage as a result of losing her land, those constitutional guarantees are completely unattainable. Abstract legal rights will not survive without a material economic base.
To go beyond the level of superficial interventions we’ve been seeing we need to move to a model of structural, rights based legal and economic reform. That’s the Government of Bangladesh, civil society and the local authorities all needing to do.
To get rid of the economic underpinning of child marriage in the climate-vulnerable coastal areas the MoSW must replace the current model of ad hoc, conditional NGO support with a state-funded Universal Climate Shock Cash Guarantee.
- Direct, automatic cash transfers which are triggered immediately upon the occurrence of a documented ecological shock (e.g., a heatwave in a particular area which is above historical norms, a breach of salinity threshold, severe riverbank erosion etc).
- Transfers must go directly to the female head of household. The provision of a state guaranteed income floor removes the immediate financial pressure to ‘sell’ the young girls during the agricultural collapse.
The government, alongside the Dhaka North and South City Corporations, must reform the Bangladesh National Building Code (BNBC) to treat indoor micro-climates as a critical public health issue.
- State-subsidised application of a reflective white lime-wash coating to corrugated tin roofs in informal settlements, which has been shown to reduce indoor temperatures by 3 to 5°C at very low cost.
- The statutory building standards require high-density housing developers to provide cross-ventilation, shaded corridors, and thermal insulation materials.
- Build municipal cooling centers in working-class areas with clean water, medical monitoring and childcare facilities as part of the public utility of thermal defence rather than as a private commodity.
The Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change must reform the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) to incorporate social reproduction indicators into national climate budgeting.
- Requiring time-use surveys to capture the number of hours that working-class women spend on heat mitigation, water collection, and family care during climate events.
- Allocating adaptation funds to reduce the amount of domestic physical labour (e.g. piped community water connections, affordable communal cooking spaces) thereby reducing the health burden on women from cooking in the overheated indoor micro-climates.
Rather than depending on voluntary donor allocations via the UNFCCC Loss and Damage Fund, the Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs needs to establish the legal infrastructure to bring binding tort claims against the major fossil fuel companies (the Carbon Majors).
- Using climate attribution data to establish causal links between specific corporate emissions and damage to the local economy in Bangladesh.
- Supporting public-interest litigation in foreign jurisdictions (drawing on precedents like Milieudefensie v. Royal Dutch Shell and Lliuya v. RWE), seeking direct civil tort damages for infrastructure destruction, displacement, and environmental restoration.
The Bangladesh climate crisis is a case in point of how environmental degradation is inextricably linked to class, to gendered forms of labour and to historical inequalities. The current set of models in play (short-term student voluntarism, donor funded awareness campaigns, technocratic adaptation) all fail to address the underlying structures of exploitation.
Thermal inequality is not a natural consequence. It is the product of policy choices that effectively privatize comfort and socialize the environmental costs. If a city lets its luxury high-rises radiate heat out onto the informal settlements below, or if a state allows the poor mother and young girl to take the brunt of the agrarian shock, it is committing structural violence in the name of ‘resilience’.
Real social impact requires us to go beyond the trappings of charity. It requires serious research translation, real engagement with institutional policy, and a total rejection of the idea that we can just go around using vulnerable communities as subjects for our international fellowship credit. We need to frame heat stress as an issue of economic extraction, indoor microclimates as an issue of reproductive rights, and climate displacement as the primary driver of child marriage. That’s the intellectual foundation we need to build real policy. True climate justice won’t be achieved through charity from the top down or through the simple act of donors giving money. It will be achieved when the state itself ensures the working class’s material, thermal, and economic security.
