In the Sundarbans delta — where Bangladesh meets the sea across 10,000 square kilometres of mangrove and tidal island — salinity has made whole upazilas unworkable for farming. Storm surges that once came once a generation now arrive twice a decade. In Bhola district, an island of 1.8 million people, the waterline has moved four kilometres inland since 2010. That is not a forecast. It has already happened.
The government's response, laid out in the 2024 National Climate Adaptation Plan and now under active construction, is six Porikolpona Nogor — "planned cities" — on elevated inland sites in Mymensingh, Rangpur, and Sylhet. Each is designed for 500,000 people, with schools, hospitals, commercial zones, and light industrial areas. Connected to existing regional infrastructure by new road and rail links. These are not refugee camps. They are built to the same urban standard as Dhaka's planned satellite towns.
Financing comes from the Green Climate Fund ($4.8 billion), the Asian Development Bank, and bilateral commitments from the UK and EU. Officially, no donor government has called this climate reparations. In substance, that is what it is — and everyone in the room knows it.
The hard part is not the construction. Coastal communities in Bangladesh are not at the water's edge by accident. Their economies, their social structures, their identities are built around fishing, delta rice cultivation, and islands that families have worked for generations. The government's incentive package — priority city allocation for early movers, above-market land compensation, guaranteed school placement for children — has produced registration numbers that exceed capacity. But registration and actual relocation are different things. Social researchers tracking the process are watching carefully. The numbers look good on paper. The people have not moved yet.
"We cannot stop the water," said Environment Minister Saber Hossain Chowdhury. "We can build somewhere for our people to go."