OP-ED — PART TWO OF TWO
In Part One of this series, I described a tornado that spun through Sugandha Point in Cox’s Bazar this week, and the wider pattern it belongs to: a coastline where cyclones, floods, landslides, and now sudden tornadoes are compounding faster than a single season can absorb. I ended by asking a question worth sitting with: when the wind passes and the water recedes, who is left standing in a coastal household, and what are they expected to carry?
In many of Cox’s Bazar’s fishing, salt, farming, and tourism-linked communities, the answer is often a woman. This matters because Bangladesh’s coastal zone is not a marginal landscape. It spans more than 580 kilometres and is home to more than a quarter of the country’s population. Around 35 million people live across Bangladesh’s coastal belt, spread over 19 coastal districts, where lives and livelihoods remain deeply exposed to cyclones, storm surges, salinity intrusion, tidal flooding, erosion, and repeated livelihood disruption.
The risks are also growing. The World Bank estimates that 13.3 million people in Bangladesh may become internal climate migrants over the next 30 years due to climate impacts on agriculture, water scarcity, and sea-level rise, with higher impacts expected for women. For coastal households, this is not a distant projection. It is already visible in disrupted fishing seasons, damaged homesteads, salinity-affected farming, fragile tourism work, and migration decisions made under pressure.
When a man migrates to a city, a fishing boat, a construction site, or sometimes overseas, he does not take the household’s uncertainty with him. Much of it remains at home. The woman who stays may now manage children’s schooling, elderly relatives, food and water security, homestead assets, debt repayment, and the household’s response to the next shock. Her workload does not simply continue; it often expands.
What she may not gain, however, is authority in the same proportion. She may be the person holding the household together, but still not the person who can independently decide to take a loan, sell an asset, change a livelihood strategy, or speak with equal weight in local adaptation discussions. She carries responsibility. Authority may arrive more slowly.
This is not a story of individual failure. It is a quieter structural question: how do households, communities, institutions, and support systems recognize the person who is already doing much of the work of resilience? Bangladesh’s National Adaptation Plan recognizes that socio-cultural factors and lower participation in decision-making can increase women’s vulnerability, even where women demonstrate strong coping capacity. The policy language is increasingly gender-responsive; the next challenge is ensuring that participation is not only present on paper, but meaningful in practice.
It is easy, and often well-intentioned, to say that coastal women are resilient. But resilience is not the same as agency. Endurance is not the same as voice. A woman may cope with a flood, stretch food across a week, keep children in school, repay a loan, and rebuild a damaged home yet still remain only partially visible in the decisions that shape her household’s future.
This is why the language we use matters. Coastal women should not be seen only as victims of climate events, nor only as heroic survivors. Both images are incomplete. The more difficult and useful question is: what would it take for a woman in Kutubdia or Maheshkhali to have a genuine say in the adaptation choices she is already helping to carry?
The answer may not lie in one grand intervention. It may lie in many small acts of recognition: who is invited to speak, whose name is written down, whose consent is sought, whose financial decision is trusted, whose mobility constraints are considered, and whose experience shapes the next warning, shelter, loan, training, or livelihood programme.
Evidence from gender and disaster-management work in Bangladesh suggests that women’s meaningful participation can make preparedness more attentive to privacy, safety, sanitation, asset protection, care responsibilities, and evacuation realities. UN Women has also emphasized that women’s engagement in community-based disaster management structures helps make emergency facilities and processes more responsive to women’s needs.
Early warning and shelter decisions also carry gendered realities. UN Bangladesh has noted that during Cyclone Remal, conservative social norms, care responsibilities, sanitation concerns, limited livestock space, and aid-distribution challenges shaped women’s disaster experiences and could delay evacuation. These are not abstract gender issues; they are the practical details through which survival decisions are made.
So the point is not to assign blame. Bangladesh has made globally recognized progress in disaster preparedness, cyclone shelters, embankments, and early warning systems. The World Bank notes that decades of investment have helped strengthen coastal resilience, including embankment systems, cyclone shelters, nature-based approaches, and early-warning capacity.
The point is more modest, and perhaps more urgent: as climate risks become more layered, resilience must become more relational. It must ask not only whether a household survived, but who made survival possible; not only whether a warning was issued, but who could act on it; not only whether support reached a family, but who inside that family had the authority to use it.
That is the vision worth holding onto, even after a tornado has come and gone in three to five minutes: a Cox’s Bazar where the next warning whether it is a cyclone signal, a landslide bulletin, or a funnel cloud spinning in from the Bay is heard by, trusted by, and acted on by the person who has been carrying the household’s resilience all along.
Not eventually. Not as an afterthought. From the start.
Dr. Nusrat Hafiz is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Women Empowerment Cell at BRAC Business School, BRAC University. Her research focuses on gender, entrepreneurship, and livelihood resilience in climate-vulnerable coastal communities.
