Poor and lower-caste women shoulder the worst impacts of climate change in the Sundarbans. The area also highlights key lessons on building climate resilience. Panchanan Dolui, who lives on Mousuni Island in the Indian Sundarbans, has shifted homes three times due to floods and river erosion. Each time he moves further from the shrinking edge to avoid displacement. He has watched the river eat away vast tracts of land. “Where do we go? There is nowhere to go,” he laments. Located in West Bengal, the Sundarbans forest system is a cluster of low-lying islands, and represents the largest mangrove ecosystem in the world. It is home to several endangered species, and acts as a natural barrier against cyclones, storm surges and other environmental hazards. The forests are also natural agents of carbon capture and sequestration. But things are changing fast. As Kalyan Rudra, Chairperson of the West Bengal Pollution Control Board, says of some of the islands: “They are not safe for human habitation because of erosion.” The four cyclones that hit the eastern coast of India between 2019-21 – Fani, Amphan, Bulbul and Yaas – point to the increasingly unpredictable weather events in the Sundarbans caused by climate change and sea level rise. Sundarbans inhabitants have faced climate-induced displacement for decades. Lohachara was one of the first inhabited islands to disappear under the sea in 1996, forcing residents to relocate to neighbouring islands, often without documents or property deeds. In the face of limited livelihood options, and without sufficient development in the region, migration has become a coping strategy for many residents. There have been several waves of migration within the Sundarbans, often on the same island, to avoid flooding from embankment breaches, tidal bores and storm surges. Since Cyclone Aila in 2009, distress migration driven by economic vulnerability has resulted in men taking up work as informal migrant workers across India where labour laws are often weaponised against them. Women-led households in the Sundarbans are more common than in any other area in India because of distress migration. But these households are often marked by debt burdens, a high number of dependents, lack of economic power and limited livelihood options. Meanwhile, increasing land salinity – due to severe cyclonic storms and tidal wave action, which carries sea water from the Bay of Bengal into the Sundarbans delta – impedes soil productivity in the area. Salinity-resistant paddy farming is an important form of climate change adaptation in the area that has become increasingly popular over the past decade. Increased salinity, however, has also led to brackish water shrimp farming on a commercial scale, causing land degradation and negatively impacting the sustainable development of the area. Significantly, the health of women who perform the poorly-paid marginal labour of prawn seed collection – which involves standing anywhere up to six hours in saline water – is adversely affected. Increasing salinity is a leading cause of reproductive health problems among rural women in the Sundarbans, including pelvic inflammation and urinary tract infections. The intersection of salinity, women’s health, and its effect on family systems and local economy remains an under-researched area that deserves urgent attention. Increasing salinity has also led to a severely degraded mangrove ecosystem, affecting biodiversity and loss of forest reserves which sustain local communities. The pressure on forest resources also amplifies man-animal conflict in the area. The Sundarbans, both in Bangladesh and West Bengal, are home to tiger widows, women whose husbands went into the Sundarbans reserve forest area for fishing or honey collection and were killed by tigers. There is no official recognition for such deaths since entry into the reserve forest – where activities like fishing and honey and crab-collecting were carried out — became “illegal” for forest dwellers once the area was declared a Tiger reserve in 1973 and came under the Wildlife Protection Act. Pradip Chatterjee, ex-president of Dakshinbanga Matsyajibi Forum or the West Bengal Fishers’ Union, calls these tiger deaths be-aini mrityu or illegal deaths, marked by the erasure of the person’s existence. He notes that the local police station refuses to make entries of the tiger deaths because of their “illegal” nature, hampering the process of applying for compensation – a bureaucratic labyrinth which requires the deceased’s kin to produce a police report and death certificate. Recently, the Calcutta High Court acknowledged tiger deaths in prohibited wildlife zones in a landmark decision, ordering the State Forest Department to pay full compensation to two tiger widows.