Floods, storms upended their lives in Bangladesh; work in Singapore gives them chance to rebuild

KHULNA DIVISION, Bangladesh/SINGAPORE The photograph is taped to a cracked pane of the wooden cupboard. It shows a dapper young man wearing a shirt, slim-fitting trousers and squeaky clean grey sneakers. He is leaning against a coconut tree, his gaze intently fixed on the camera.

Mr Md Emran Hosain printed this photo and gave it to his family before he left home, a crumbling wooden hut in the Sundarbans region of southern Bangladesh, near the border with India. It is a photo that his family looks at affectionately every day.

More than 2,800km away in Singapore, the 24-year-old looks very different. Dressed in shabby blue overalls and wearing a yellow helmet, Mr Emran toils at a shipyard in Tuas, marking and classifying pipes for use. He is one of many Bangladeshi migrants who have found work in the city-state.

In July 2024, Mr Emran left 9 No. Sora village in Gabura Union of the Satkhira district, unable to earn a decent living because of what climate change had done to the land. His search for work led him to Singapore, where he hopes to build a better future for himself and his family.

“I thought about the well-being of my family, about how I could make my own life better,” said Mr Emran, seated outside his Tuas workers’ dormitory one recent evening in November, as snatches of a Bengali song drifted in from one of the many lorries in a nearby carpark.

“I thought about many such things, which is why I came this far,” the father of a two-year-old girl wistfully told ST.

He is one of thousands of young climate migrants who are compelled each year to leave their homes and families in the low-lying coastal regions of Bangladesh, where recurring disasters have crippled their livelihoods.

As the world warms, these disasters are worsening for Bangladesh, one of the nations most vulnerable to climate change.

Criss-crossed by hundreds of rivers, including major ones such as the Padma and Meghna, the low-lying, densely populated nation is prone to both riverine floods and those caused by rising sea levels. Nearly 80 per cent of Bangladesh’s surface area is floodplain, and around two-thirds of it is less than 5m above sea level.

Storms along the southern coast have unleashed catastrophic tidal surges and floods that erode land and breach protective embankments, washing saline water into farmlands and fishing ponds. This renders farming and freshwater fishing — the two key local economic mainstays — untenable.

It is a devastating blow to this overwhelmingly agrarian rural region, where government jobs remain scarce and private investment has been chronically low. The southern coastal region is home to 28 per cent of Bangladesh’s population or around 45 million people.

The blows are now coming with frightening regularity and are even predicted to become more frequent. People recollect the horror of the many cyclones that struck southern Bangladesh in the past two decades, among them Sidr (2007), Aila (2009), Bulbul (2019), Amphan (2020), Yaas (2021) and Remal (2024).

Each cyclone set struggling families back by many years, piling on losses and pushing them further into debt.

Mr Emran’s 56-year-old father, Mr Sardar, has seen his house damaged by cyclones at least thrice.

Aila in 2009, which “levelled villages like graveyards”, said residents, was particularly destructive. It demolished Mr Sardar’s house and killed his livestock — comprising goats, ducks and hens — saddling him with losses of more than 500,000 taka ($5,335).

Mr Sardar, who, like many others here, gave up farming rice more than a decade ago because of saltwater incursions, now relies on rearing shrimp and fish in marine water enclosures — locally called gher — and stray offers of daily wage work.

There are good years when he can make an annual profit of 50,000 taka from his 0.2ha gher.

And then there are bad years, like 2025. High summer temperatures and increased salinity, he said, killed many of his fish, and he does not expect to recoup his investment of around 100,000 taka.

“The gher cannot sustain my son and me,” said Mr Sardar. “Even I can’t fully survive on it.”

With labour-intensive rice cultivation mostly a thing of the past, daily wage work as a farm labourer has also dried up, averaging just a few days each month. On a lucky day in September, Mr Sardar was able to find work, levelling ground with a shovel so that a neighbour could build a house.

For seven hours of work, he earned 500 taka. “Had there been work here that paid 500 taka daily (for his son), I would not have sent him away,” said Mr Sardar.

“No parent would want to be without their son,” added Mr Emran’s mother, Ms Hasna Hena, 47, wiping tears away with the edge of her sari. “We had to send him because of this hardship.”

Little Ifti, meanwhile, played around in the verandah — oblivious to the family’s sorrow — with a portable fan that her father had sent as a gift from Singapore.

Bangladesh is the world’s eighth-most populous country and is at the forefront of climate change challenges. In the northern region, flash floods and river erosion wreak havoc on homes and farmlands, causing extensive damage and despair.

ST visited multiple villages spread across three districts of the coastal Khulna Division in September to interview many families with migrant household members.

According to the Geneva-headquartered research organisation Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, the number of people displaced by disasters in Bangladesh in 2024 rose for the fourth consecutive year to reach 2.4 million, its third-highest figure.

By 2050, the government predicts that one in every seven Bangladeshis will be displaced due to climate change — a staggering 28 million refugees.

Millions of people have been displaced within Bangladesh since 2008.

Many of them flock to cities, including the capital, Dhaka, but an increasing number are migrating abroad as Bangladesh’s cities and its lower-middle-income economy struggle to accommodate them. Dhaka is already bursting at the seams with 24 million people in the greater metropolitan area.

Most migrants go to the Middle East, as well as to South-east Asia, including Singapore.

The number of workers taking up overseas employment jumped to more than one million in 2024, up from 272,958 in 2004.

The number of Bangladeshis taking up overseas jobs has soared since 1976.

A report on climate-induced migration, published in February 2025 by the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development and the Ovibashi Karmi Unnayan Program (OKUP), a community-based migrant organisation in Bangladesh, found that 88 per cent of households had someone who migrated internationally between 2011 and 2024. This is a sharp increase compared with just 4 per cent between 1990 and 2000.

In Pirojpur and Sylhet, nearly every home has someone considering overseas migration.
Percentage of households that initiated international migration

The data is based on their research in two districts — Pirojpur in the south and Sylhet in the north — where flash floods and cyclones have compromised food security and disrupted livelihoods.

OKUP chairman Shakirul Islam estimates that around two out of every 10 Bangladeshi climate migrants are going overseas, a trend that is on the rise. “Bangladesh is a deltaic low-lying land, and it will always be highly vulnerable because of its geographic location,” he said.

From 1960 to 2022, the frequency of climate-related disasters in Bangladesh nearly doubled, rising from an average of four events per year before 1990 to seven after 1990.

The number of climate-related disasters in Bangladesh has been slowly rising since 1960, peaking in 2020.

In Pirojpur, the average estimated annual asset loss per household reached 100,385 taka in 2024, and 84,506 taka in Sylhet. For many households, this is close to half or more of what they earn in a year, compared with the annual average national per capita income of 339,211 taka. The majority of households in the two districts also reported a significant drop in crop and fish production due to salinity, erratic rainfall, flooding and rising temperatures.

Mr Islam added that while locals receive immediate assistance such as food rations, there is little to help victims rehabilitate themselves in the long term. “For example, if their houses are destroyed, there is not enough support to rebuild the houses. Or if their farms are destroyed, there is no support to rebuild them,” he told ST.

And even when they manage to rebuild and find their footing, there is the risk of another climate disaster knocking them down again.

This drives many to migrate in search of alternative livelihoods, but the country’s developing economy has failed to keep pace with the more than two million people who join the workforce every year — resulting in high youth unemployment — let alone create additional jobs for those displaced by climate impacts.

“That is why migration (overseas) has become a major strategy for hundreds of thousands of people,” said Mr Islam.

Singapore is among the top international destinations for Bangladeshi migrants in 2023.

Between 2010 and 2023, employment growth in the country averaged only 2.2 per cent, with jobs in the manufacturing sector — a critical avenue for absorbing those abandoning unsustainable agrarian livelihoods — declining by 1.3 million over the same period.

Bangladesh’s economy grapples with an entrenched structural problem: its reliance on farm jobs. The share of agricultural jobs among total employment has hovered stubbornly around 45 to 47 per cent since 2010. This is despite climate shocks, rising input costs such as fertiliser and increased development pressure on land. These factors are making agriculture less and less appealing.

At the same time, literacy levels have jumped considerably — up from 59.82 per cent in 2010 to nearly 78 per cent in 2024.

Dr Md Golam Rabbani, associate director at BRAC’s Climate Hub, refers to this rise in literacy levels as a “silent revolution” that poses a key challenge for Bangladesh. Can the country create enough well-paying non-farm jobs for its youth? BRAC is among the largest international development organisations founded in Bangladesh.

“The challenge is more acute because not only will Bangladesh have to create enough non-farm jobs for its educated people, but also for those who will lose their livelihoods because of climate change,” he said.

Young people aged between 15 and 29 account for 76.33 per cent of the total unemployed population, highlighting the entrenched challenges in accessing decent work. More than nine out of 10 who do find work are employed in the informal sector, where wages are low and working conditions poor.

In 2024, youth unemployment was a pivotal factor behind the student-led protests that rocked Bangladesh. The anger and frustration among young people led to former prime minister Sheikh Hasina fleeing the country.

Mr Debashis Haldar, 22, is seated in a lorry with three other Bangladeshi workers on his way to a night shift at a workshop in Jurong West. He looks out at the city’s darkening skyline, one he has helped build by cutting iron rods destined for construction sites across Singapore for more than a year.

The quote on his black-and-white T-shirt reads “Something Better”, aptly capturing why he left Dakshin Bedkashi village in Bangladesh’s southern coastal Khulna district for Singapore. Like Mr Emran, he came in pursuit of something better.

Back in Bangladesh, Mr Haldar had dropped out of college to help run his father’s veterinary drug shop, which brought in 10,000 taka each month. He did not want to work as a farmhand and inquired about getting a government job as a veterinarian. However, due to endemic corruption, such a position would allegedly have required a bribe of 1.4 million taka.

Instead, his family put together 1.25 million taka by mortgaging their land and borrowing from friends and microfinance NGOs to send Mr Haldar to work in Singapore, where his uncle was already a migrant worker.

The promise of a higher salary in Singapore, albeit as a construction worker, was a stronger draw. But it was a stretch to find all that money, much of which was spent on pre-departure work training and paying agents in Bangladesh, who profit from the local desperation to migrate abroad.

The Haldars have been set back by repeated climate disasters, with their house demolished entirely or partially by storms more than five times. Their current tin-and-wood hut, built in the aftermath of the 2009 Aila cyclone, stands on an elevated brick platform, approximately 106cm high, taller than the water level that had inundated the entire neighbourhood back then.

Surviving in the face of such disasters has been difficult for the family, who also rely on subsistence farming and fishing, forcing them to regularly take loans to meet daily needs. “I always have a loan on my head, if not, we cannot survive,” Mr Haldar’s father, Mr Tapon Haldar, 53, told ST.

“If we could have earned 20,000 taka each month, I would not have sent him away,” he added, as he sat under his leaking roof during a torrential September afternoon downpour.

The younger Mr Haldar, who arrived in Singapore in September 2024, has not been home to see his parents. It is not just the price of the ticket that deters him, but also the cost of gifts he must buy for his family and friends.

It is for this reason that he does not intend to visit them for the next five to 10 years; he wants to save as much as possible while in Singapore. It is a price he is ready to pay so that he can return home with a one-way ticket, care for his parents, rebuild his house and run the family pharmacy.

“I am doing all this for them,” he said.

Gabura Union, a cluster of 15 villages with around 48,000 residents, is among the most climate-vulnerable areas in Bangladesh. The 33 sq km riverine island in the southern deltaic region has shrunk because of erosion, losing about 400ha of land in the past five decades.

A substantial part of the island was waterlogged for up to two years after Cyclone Aila, when embankments collapsed. Since then, recurring storms and saline water incursions have made agrarian livelihoods even more unsustainable. Soil salinity now affects about 1.056 million ha, nearly two-thirds of Bangladesh’s coastal area, severely impacting the region’s agricultural productivity, water security and public health.

And yet, you would not get a whiff of this misery from a seemingly utopian early evening at 10 No. Sora village on Sept 23, 2025. Abundant post-monsoon verdure shimmered in the gathering dusk. Local men played carrom or ludo, a strategy-based board game, their laughter and chatter ringing out at the local market. Others sat drinking tea in front of a television playing a National Geographic animal documentary.

But they were there only because paid work dries up in the rainy season. From October onwards, when the monsoon rains recede, villages in southern coastal Bangladesh empty out as able-bodied men, from their early teens to their 50s, move to various cities throughout the country in search of work. Most end up at brick kilns — another key source of employment — for several months until the monsoon season begins again in June.

Mr Md Sobuj Hossain, 18, was manning his father’s tea stall at the local market. But for the past three years, he has worked at brick kilns across the country during the dry months, earning 700 taka daily, to supplement his family’s income. This year, he plans to leave for a kiln in Comilla, a small city in the country’s south-east.

He hopes to work abroad one day. “Staying in the country has not proved productive at all,” said Mr Hossain. But the high upfront cost involved in migrating overseas has been a hurdle for the poor family.

Another local from the village, Mr Md Sohag, has given up any dreams of working abroad, as his impoverished and landless family cannot afford it. “I do not hope for something that I cannot achieve,” the 24-year-old said fatalistically.

He has worked at brick kilns for the past seven years, but the hard labour has left him with a chronic backache. This year, he borrowed money to buy a second-hand motorcycle, something many unemployed young men do, to ferry people and goods.

He makes about 300 taka each day, barely enough to meet his needs and supplement his father’s monthly earnings as a fisherman of around 20,000 taka. “It is difficult to survive here,” added Mr Sohag, the father of a two-year-old boy.

It is a refrain one often hears — from ageing parents of migrant men who battle solitude, and from wives and daughters left behind, who struggle just to secure drinking water because of rising salinity.

At Pakhimara village, which is part of Padmapukur Union in Satkhira district, a group of women gathered around a government tap that supplies drinking water daily between 8am and 11am. “The water still tastes saline, but we drink it just so that we can survive,” said Ms Rabia Khatun, 26, one of the women who had lined up under the fierce sun.

During the summer months, when harvested rainwater is scarce, queues can stretch up to 100 people. “There are times we don’t even manage to get one pitcher of water,” said Ms Nazmun Nahar, 41. That is when people in this region have to travel farther — at times even kilometres — in search of potable water or depend on local groundwater sourced through tube wells. The more saline groundwater can cause problems such as skin disorders and hypertension.

Gabura Union has become so infamous for its climate-linked hardships that families from outside are hesitant to allow their daughters to marry someone from there.

“How could I give my daughter to someone from Gabura Union? She could stay on the embankment road for three months,” noted one woman in a recent study, referring to the length of time people often spend on higher ground after floods.

Even those who return frequently look for ways to get out again. Mr Md Sohel Hosain came back home to 9 No. Sora village in April 2025 after five years at a shipyard in Singapore. He dug into his savings to buy a bricks-and-mortar house, pay for his wedding and help treat his mother’s chronic asthma.

Mr Hosain, 25, wanted to set up a garment store too, but ran out of money. The lack of job options in Gabura Union has not helped.

Agriculture and fishing, he says, are “loss-making projects”, and there is a lack of other work. On the rare occasions when daily wage work is available, it involves several hours of hard labour for just 500 taka — something aspirational, educated youth such as Mr Hosain are unwilling to do for so little.

“In the six months that I have been back, I have not earned even one thousand taka,” he said. “Had there been a job at a factory here, it would have been better.” He is now looking for an opportunity to return to Singapore.

Studies estimate that sea levels in Bangladesh could rise by 14cm to 100cm by the end of this century. Fighting this grim prediction are machines and men across the southern coastal region, where taller and stronger embankments are being built with concrete blocks and sturdier materials than the fragile earthen embankments constructed in the 1960s.

The government is also trying to address the growing number of people moving inland, a shift that has brought a host of urban development challenges, including providing access to services such as sustainable housing and even the most basic needs, like drinking water.

It is a challenge that many low-lying nations will face in the decades ahead as sea levels continue to rise and populations shift from coastal areas towards inland areas. For Bangladesh, though, the threat is already acute because of its large and dense population.

The United Nations’ top climate science body has said sea-level rise and coastal erosion could lead to a loss of 17 per cent of Bangladesh’s land surface and 30 per cent of food production by 2050.

Today, not just Dhaka but also many smaller Bangladeshi cities such as Mongla, Khulna, and Barisal are home to millions of climate migrants.

Mongla, with its seaport and an export processing zone, has attracted many, quadrupling its population from 40,000 in 2011 to over 160,000.

Here, the government, buoyed by foreign investment, has focused on developing industries such as garment manufacturing, creating thousands of jobs, while also expanding housing infrastructure and making the city more flood-resistant by constructing an 11km-long embankment and two flood-control gates.

It is today touted as a model town for climate migrants. Ms Nur Nahar, who is in her 40s, moved to Mongla with her husband and son in 2020. They left Morrelganj, in Khulna Division’s Bagherhat district, after their tin and bamboo hut was destroyed by Cyclone Amphan.

“We did not have the money to rebuild,” she said. Their troubles doubled when her husband, who drives a “van” — a three-wheeled bicycle with a wooden platform on the back — to transport people and goods, could not find work in Morrelganj subsequently.

While they found work in Mongla, they faced other challenges, including living in an area where they had to buy drinking water, spending around 2 taka for every litre, which added to their living costs.

In 2023, they moved to Narikeltola, a cluster of around 60 households in Mongla, where BRAC, together with the local municipality and other partners, set up several large tanks to harvest rainwater as well as store filtered water drawn from a freshwater pond. “Now we don’t have to buy water any more,” added Ms Nahar.

It is part of a number of joint government and civil society efforts to develop climate-resilient and migrant-friendly towns in Bangladesh to curb the instinct to flock to Dhaka.

There are other interventions, including dedicated housing for climate migrants, such as the government’s Khurushkul housing project in Cox’s Bazar, a resort town in the country’s south-east.

In 2021, the government released its National Strategy on Internal Displacement Management, which includes measures such as restricting the construction of settlements in unprotected or highly vulnerable areas and creating employment opportunities closer to areas where displacement may occur due to climate change and disasters.

But the details of how this strategy will be implemented are still unclear, prompting experts such as Dr Rabbani to call for a uniform policy, instead of disjointed efforts, to tackle the vast problem at scale through planned relocation and skilling backed by funding.

“This is necessary because of Bangladesh’s large population and its growing exposure to climatic threats,” said Dr Rabbani. “Scarcity of land has already created a dilemma for us.”

A ticket abroad does not always mean a ticket out of misery. There is the constant worry about repaying massive loans taken out to find a job overseas. Mr Emran, who dropped out of Grade 12 in school, borrowed nearly 900,000 taka to move to Singapore, of which he has been able to repay less than half.

He is not earning as much as he had expected — about $650 per month for eight to 10 hours of work daily — and manages to send home only around $350 after paying for his living expenses. “Back home, I had no means to earn, and while I earn here, there is still no peace of mind,” said Mr Emran, who regrets coming to Singapore.

He constantly worries about repaying his creditors on time, and he misses his family. But he knows he cannot go back before he repays his loan. “It is as if I am in a jail.”

His best-case scenario? That he repays his loan and saves a few hundred thousand taka by July 2027, when his contract expires, to return and start a small-scale agri business in his village. “What’s the point of staying away from my family for so many years if I cannot return with savings for their future?” he said, fearful of being deemed a “failure” by locals in his village.

Worse is in store for others. Ms Nasrin Sultana’s husband, Mr Kausar Ali, left for Saudi Arabia in January 2025 to be a construction worker. But the 40-year-old has not been able to send even a single taka home.

The first few months went by without any jobs, and he has rarely been paid for those he worked since, revealing a recurring pattern of exploitation of desperate Bangladeshi workers in the Gulf.

Meanwhile, with her husband away, Ms Sultana, 36, looks after their five children, something she barely manages on earnings that her eldest son makes with his motorcycle taxi and her work at a fish farm.

They scrape together 15,000 taka each month, which has forced her to buy groceries on credit, adding to the family’s debt of 600,000 taka, spent to send Mr Ali abroad.

“It was better when he was here. At least he would earn 300 to 400 taka per day,” said Ms Sultana.

She is seated outside her ramshackle wood-and-bamboo hut in Pakhimara village, with her eight-month-old son blissfully asleep in a hammock on the verandah. There is rarely any such relief for Ms Sultana though, who wages a constant battle against nature.

Her house is perched precariously on the bank of the Kholpetua River. The ground where the family’s toilet and kitchen once stood was washed away in a storm in 2024. They have since been rebuilt, even though the tin roof over her kitchen is pockmarked with holes, letting in water each time it pours.

Coming back is not an option for Mr Ali. Speaking on the phone from Riyadh, he says he is hanging on so that his dues are cleared before his current work permit expires in April 2026.

Human trafficking, too, has reared its head in southern coastal Bangladesh with unscrupulous agents preying on desperate residents. OKUP has documented at least 12 cases from Satkhira district alone, where young men were promised jobs in Europe but found themselves trapped in Libya instead.

Among them is Mr Rezwan Karim, the son of a poor farming couple in Kaikhali Union of Satkhira district. The 26-year-old helped out at his uncle’s medical drug store, earning just about 6,000 taka per month, when he was lured by agents with the promise of a job at a store in Italy for a few hundred thousand taka each month.

He borrowed money from friends and relatives and somehow put together the 1.75 million taka that the agents had asked for, leaving for what he thought was Italy in December 2024. But he has been held captive in Tripoli, with his traffickers making repeated ransom calls to his family back in Bangladesh.

His paternal uncle, Mr Md Abdus Salam, 44, said the horrific video calls show a frail Mr Karim being beaten and abused by his captors. The helpless family has coughed up an additional 900,000 taka to try to secure his release by selling their house and land.

“We have nothing more left to give,” said Mr Salam, adding that locals now even avoid speaking to Mr Karim’s father, fearing he would ask them for money. The family has complained to the authorities, who have yet to make any breakthrough.

OKUP’s Mr Islam described human trafficking in climate-vulnerable areas as a huge concern, as it risks pushing families further into debt bondage, tying them down in “modern slavery”.

Yet, the risk of an illegal journey seems tempting to those with little to lose. “They have little going in their favour here,” noted Mr Islam. “So they think if they die while crossing the Mediterranean, it’s fine. Because if they survive, they can then build a new future.”

“If safe migration pathways are not created,” added Mr Islam, “then this community will become further vulnerable.”

One way to do this could be to encourage developed countries with a shortage of human resources to train locals here according to their needs in partnership with Bangladeshi stakeholders and get them to move overseas.

“This will be a win-win option for both host and origin countries,” noted Dr Mizan R. Khan, former deputy director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka. “It could be considered an in-kind support (for climate adaptation).”

It is not all gloom and doom. The sight of bigger and stronger embankments being built in various parts of the country’s southern coast since 2023 gives many people hope that they will be able to stave off the worst next time a cyclone hits.

Mr Murad Hosain, who spent five years working in Singapore and returned home in September 2025 to Dakshin Bedkashi village in Khulna district, is among them. Using his savings, he bought an acre of land that he eventually wants to use for a dairy and beef business and then expand into farming. He is convinced the new embankments will hold up.

He is a philosophical man, who quotes the Prophet in his conversations. But Mr Hosain is also very driven to succeed. He began as a welder in Singapore in 2020 and moved up the ranks to become an excavator operator, earning around $1,400 per month. He now plans to go back to Singapore in early 2026 for a better-paying job and save up more money for his project.

“Everything is possible,” he said, as we stood under a shop’s canopy to shelter from the pouring rain while sipping mango drinks. “There is nothing that a human can’t do. For death, he can fight everything.”

Things are looking up for Mr Haldar, too. With his monthly earnings of around $1,350, including overtime pay, he has been able to repay most of his loan.

Mr Haldar expects to repay the entire debt of 1.25 million taka in another two to three months. And when he finally gets rid of the burden that has weighed heavily on him since he arrived in Singapore in September 2024, he wants to treat himself by touring some of the city’s iconic locations.

On the to-do list is a ride on the Singapore Flyer, the tall Ferris wheel in downtown Singapore, which he is mesmerised by but never had the time and money for. A 30-minute ride will set him back by $40. “Nearly double my daily basic pay,” Mr Haldar said, with a smile.