 This is, I guess, a presentation of some of the fieldwork that I did, essentially, for my PhD, and looking at exploring the relationship between human rights and climate change through the lens of this particular area in India called the Sundarbans. In a sense, I wanted to show you how this relationship, or what's happening in the Sundarbans, is a product of both history and things that are happening today. So the idea is not to get into a very sort of legal or policy discussion, more to explore the relationships and complexities between human rights and climate change in terms of what exactly is happening on the ground. So if we start with human rights, we obviously live in an age of human rights. We hear about it all the time. And India is no different. India has recognized a number of human rights through its constitution or read them in through the Supreme Court or other courts. And including in this are some of the rights that I explore a little bit more. In this presentation, the right to water, the right to livelihoods, the right to food, and the right to a healthy environment. But of course, with lots of human rights, the issue is usually in implementation, and so we'll be looking at that as well. On top of this, on top of us living in sort of this age of human rights, more and more people are talking about what is the relationship between human rights and climate change. Can we still think about human rights in the same way? How are human rights impacted by climate change? And you see this at the top levels of governmental organizations. At the top you have political declarations from the UN Human Rights Council plus resolutions saying human rights and climate change are interlinked. You also have the Paris Agreement on climate change, which I'm sure everyone's familiar with, and that's also acknowledging that human rights are impacted by climate change. You have prominent people like Barry Robinson, who was the former president of Ireland, saying climate change is the greatest threat to human rights. And you also have human rights being used by NGOs and civil society activists to drum up support for climate change action. So these are the kind of ways that we see human rights and climate change being interlinked. And even more so in terms of sort of the legal sphere, you see human rights and the environment, or human rights and climate change being linked in a number of different areas. So you have international sort of litigation. Right now it's said that there's sort of an explosion of litigation around the world and on climate change generally, but also on human rights and climate change. So I've bracketed there a case in Pakistan where this court has said actually we find that the Pakistan government by not taking action on their climate policies are breaching rights. So in this way they're kind of trying to link human rights and climate change. And then we also have what's called sort of the greening of human rights. So how do existing human rights need to incorporate climate change? And then you have procedural environmental rights, which are how do we use environmental rights that we have around access to information, on participation, to get better results for taking action on climate change, how do we sort of make it more transparent, etc. So you have all these sort of ways that human rights and climate change are being interlinked in sort of the recent past. But at the same time there's a considerable amount of I guess doubt and this stems from the fact that it's only in sort of the last 10 to 15 years that people have been sort of linking human rights and climate change. Hence you have this court where Stephen Humphries, who's at LSE, is writing in 2010 and he says that there's a mutual disinterest between human rights, people and climate change, people or human rights and climate change. And still you have people saying you know this area is under theorized, it's still vague, yeah you can say that rights are affected by climate change, but what else is there? I mean we need to be a bit more specific on how we sort of have, implement these human rights in a more sort of climate change way. And then you have the last court I've put there is Anna Greer, who's at Cardiff University and she talks about profound challenges that are faced by human rights and environmental law. And what does she mean by this? She basically says that there are some assumptions built into human rights and environmental law that if they're not challenged then the human rights and climate change sort of discourse will remain unsuccessful. So yes you may get nice declarations like the ones I showed you by courts or by political declarations, but you need to really look at the root assumptions in law and challenge those if you really want to implement human rights and climate change. And what are those assumptions that she is talking about? Well one of them is the laws and policies that we are today, who is placed at the center of these laws and policies? So who is the subject and who is the object? And she says well humans are placed at the center and the environment is kind of seen as outside. So environment is just seen as something outside of everything that's going on in the social world. And then on top of that she's also coming at it from a critical perspective, a critical feminist perspective she's looking at what are some of the other hierarchies that are built into the laws today in terms of power relations etc. Which kind of humans are given more privilege? Which kind of humans are given less privilege? So when we say humans are at the center is it the landless laborer or is it the government or a business etc. So she's asking us to look a little bit more at the assumptions that are built into the laws in terms of interrogating how human rights and climate change are interlinked. And she says if you don't do this then we will continue to fail to respond to the ecological crisis that we have at hand. And so my presentation today kind of picks up on this in terms of looking at relations between humans and relations between humans and the environment and looking at it in the lens of what's happening or what has happened in the Shundurbans. And so speaking of this kind of dichotomy that I'm trying to say about humans and the environment we see it in terms of how we speak about climate change or how we have spoken about climate change. So for many many years you know NGOs etc. we're talking about polar bears and ice. Al Gore got up on you can't really see it on a forklift kind of thing trying to show us how this graph on climate change is. But what we often miss out on and sorry and the last one is about is the tiger which we'll come to in the Shundurbans in terms of let's protect the environment in terms of protecting the tiger or protecting the forest. But we often forget that the everyday disasters of climate change are very much rooted not in some sort of external battle against carbon emissions but rather in a lot of these power relations that are occurring on a daily basis at both the local, regional and sort of global scale. So having said all that let me now introduce you to the Shundurbans. So it is an area as you can see there in the east of India it crosses over into Bangladesh so it is in Bengal as a whole and it's essentially a delta region so rivers from Himalayas come down and feed into the Bay of Bengal and that is sort of the delta that you see and it's a region where it's an intricate sort of network of mud flats, islands created from these sediment loads that have come down and essentially it's quite a unique area in terms of how land and water are sort of fluid and kind of doing this almost this dance together. So here you see some pictures and a quote there from Amitabh Kosh who's written a lot about this in terms of fiction and in terms of how the whole area is kind of interlaced in a very kind of fluid way in terms of water and land. So Shundurbans essentially it means beautiful forest in terms of a literal translation in Bengali and that's really important because that's kind of the picture that most people have of the Shundurbans when you speak to them outside of the people who live there in terms of people in cities they think of it as a forest with tigers, snakes, plants, etc. It's a biodiversity hotspot and so conservation is seen as vital in terms of protecting these forests and people are often forgotten about there are four and a half million people who live in this area and they're often forgotten about because the focus has been on protecting the forest as such and in terms of the forest it is the world's largest mangrove forest in the Shundurbans. Now what are mangroves and why are they important? Mangroves as you can see they have these breathing roots they're sort of these unique trees and when the floods come in they kind of almost disappear and then come back but they kind of hold together the islands that are there so they're a really important part of the natural flood defence or climate defence you could call it for the region but they're also importantly a really big what's called a carbon sink so they soak up the carbons and thus reduce our carbon emissions but as I said in many ways what's forgotten about in the ideas we have about the Shundurbans is the people so I wanted to show you three short pictures and clips to sort of explain this sort of relationship that I'm exploring about human rights and climate change the first one I'll show you is a few seconds of a clip from a documentary that a friend who's a filmmaker did in a sort of village that I also visited for my one field work so hopefully this works Pays the maximum price it's women in these villages who pay the maximum price of the changes that happened after an embankment is built one of the victims of the breached embankment was Ahida I watched in amazement as she trudged through the water to fetch a pitcher of fresh water She just says it's very far So, in this scenario, what you see is the relationship between climate change and human rights through a number of different things coming together. It's not just climate change has come and impacted her rights, but rather there are a number of processes. So, firstly, it's women who face the brunt of the duties around water. Water is not just for drinking, but it's for a number of uses, sanitation, health, food, et cetera. And what we see is her daily commute through the sea is because the embankment was breached, and we'll talk about embankments in a second. The other point here is that she's going to a tube well, which is located far away. And while the government has placed a number of tube wells, they don't really tell us the story of how those tube wells are used. They're used often for multiple things, how those tube wells are in terms of how regular they are with water. So, for many parts of the year, there's no water in those tube wells for a large part of the day. And they don't tell you how long someone has to line up to get water, because there's so many people dependent on one source of drinking water. So, for someone poor like Ahida, she has to do this daily. However, if you have a bit more money, then you may be able to get your own tube well or something like that if you live further inland or you can maybe get your own pond. And we see here, so a number of processes coming together. Her gender, her poverty, her social status, the geography of her location being located near an embankment, et cetera. So, this will be a continuing theme of the number of things that come together in this relationship. Moving on then, this is what I was talking about in terms of embankments. So, the entire region being very flat and very low is basically held together by these embankments that are built. They're built essentially using bamboo and mud. So, they're quite sort of simple in that sense. And in the rainy season, it's a daily sort of occurrence where they have to the people, communities have to rebuild, continue rebuilding these embankments just to keep their land from having the floods of the sea come in. Several things can be talked about when we just look at this one picture. So, what usually happens when the floods come in or the sea water comes in is as you can see, all of this gets inundated. And that means that you cannot grow crops there for a number of years. What happens then is that people become reliant on other forms of labor. Their livelihood changes. They might then seek employment as daily wage laborers, or they might go into fishing, which you see someone over there trying to catch prawns. And embankments themselves are an issue because the idea itself is to basically straightjacket the, protect the river or the sea from coming in. But they don't account for the fact that, for example, this water which comes in from the sediment loaded rivers is actually meant to unload that sediment onto the ground. That's the sort of natural sort of way it's meant to occur. But in the sense that what's happened is that you've built the embankment to protect yourself from that sediment and from that sea coming in. And what that does is make, increase the sea level as well, which you're trying to protect yourself from. And if and when this embankment breaches, the ferocity of the floods is much worse because so much more water is caught in between these embankments. So there's a basic sort of hydrology question around there, but there's no other option now you have these embankments and you have people living there. There's no other option but to keep doing it this way. A bigger question arises, which again I'll pick up on afterwards, is who maintains and looks after these embankments. And that is another element of a power relation where human rights and climate change is impacted by the sort of, the governance system that is set up for these embankments. So, and the final example or picture, sorry, that's the same, sort of that's this fisherman trying to fish while these embankments are being breached. So the final example I wanted to show you was off livelihoods in the area, specifically shrimp seed collection or prawn seed collection of prompt seed farming, which is a type of aquaculture that is particularly done by, as you can see down below, at the ground level by women primarily. And this kind of work is done, maybe she'd be working 10, 12 hours and earning about 150 to 300 rupees for the day, which is about two to three pounds. It's quite a painful sort of task, but primarily what I'm trying to emphasize here is the impact of climate change kind of changing livelihoods because if someone was previously farming and the embankment's been breached and they cannot farm anymore, they're often dependent on sort of shrimp seed farming. There's another link here to climate change, which is that this practice of prawn seed farming is seen as quite unsustainable. And why is that the case? Because the nets that are used are dragging along the ground, weakening the embankment, weakening the embankments that are used to protect the island. And also while you're doing this activity, what you do is essentially you pick up all the fish you can and then you just take out the prawn seeds and everything else is chucked out. So what that does is completely change the fish diversity in the area and then that impacts the mangroves quite badly. And that is, of course, the flood defense that I was talking about before. So it's this kind of vicious cycle of how climate change is impacting in not in kind of a linear way, but it's a kind of cycle that occurs. Also interestingly, if you see these up the top is where once the seeds are done, then they're fished and they're found in these kind of ponds. And you have an interesting practice of people who own these ponds breaking the actual embankments to allow sea water in to fill up these ponds. Again, it's this cycle that you see of climate change and human rights impacting. It's not a kind of linear relationship. So this goes back to, I guess, in a way, what we were talking about at the start, which is this profoundly complex relationship between environmental law, climate change, and society or human rights, and how interconnected they are in many ways. So what are the climate change kind of impacts in Shundurbans in terms of projected climate change impacts? Well, the first thing to note is the area, even though it's sort of seen as a climate change hotspot or whatever, a lot of the stats are under-researched or a lot of the studies is under, in general in South Asia, climate change, modeling climate change statistics can be under-researched. There's not been enough sort of longitudinal research done. But the things that we see are sea level rise well above global averages, cyclones increasing, monsoons getting drier, sorry, monsoons getting longer, but also less predictable. And that is one of the key sort of impacts in a sense because it impacts agriculture. It impacts people's ability to grow food because they cannot predict the rainfall. And then, of course, there is land loss, which I showed you in terms of the amount and number of islands which have gone under, et cetera. And finally, the mangrove link, which I've talked about already. In a way, though, the idea is not so much to focus on statistics because it's incredibly difficult to disaggregate these sort of things with what's happening on the ground. And the more we talk about some of these statistics, the harder it is in a way because there's a lot of uncertainties with science. That's not to say climate change is uncertain, but at a sort of local level, there's so many uncertainties and that confuses policymakers almost. And it becomes an excuse to basically dilly-dally and procrastinate in terms of taking action. They use it as an excuse to not take action when, actually, if the focus is more on what's happening on the ground, then it becomes more of a reason to set making some changes. In terms of development in the Shundurans, it remains one of the most underdeveloped regions. There's a number of statistics up there. I'll talk a little bit about the health statistic that I've put. The ratio of doctors to patients is truly shocking. And add to this, if you add to this a transport sort of issue, because of the way the geography of the island, it's very difficult to get from one island to another island to see a doctor. It can sometimes even a short distance can take a long time because the boats don't operate at all times. So you have many stories. Every family or every household will have stories of people basically dying on the way to see a doctor. And this, of course, again, if you think about some of the impacts of things like flooding, having increasing waterborne diseases, increasing pollution, as well as making it tougher for sort of having enough resources in terms of providing for health care, et cetera, there's this, again, a vicious cycle between development and climate change. So as I said, it's very difficult here now to disaggregate some of this underdevelopment from what's happening with climate change. But the emphasis I want to make also is that this didn't just happen because of some accident of geography as such. It was definitely produced and the environment, the human environment, the natural environment was a production of politics and law which operated for a number of years. And so in that sense, if we go back to history to sort of understand why these things happen. So just very briefly about the history of this area, the long history just shows how the way society, governments have co-produced the environment in this way. This is very much being based on this assumption that the environment is outside of us and has basically put particular institutions like the state or the landowner and given a lot of power with some of the laws and some of the policies that have been produced. So in pre-colonial time, yeah, there were some settlements from Portuguese or from, and then it was sometimes there's tales of piracy in the area and then there was small landownerships and settlement. But the sort of key element in the Shundubans' recent history has been the colonial history. So in terms of the colonial history, since about 1770, the British became really interested in this area. They said, well, actually, let's reclaim this area. Let's turn it into farmland. We want to gain taxes from this area. So they brought in a number of laws to basically legitimize that. They delegitimized whoever else was there, which is what has been done all around the world. And they basically tried to extract revenue from the area. Of course, it wasn't very successful after a while. People were faced with cyclones and this sort of environment of sedimentation, siltation, et cetera. Agriculture revenue was not very high, but still people were there living in the forest, et cetera. And then in terms of the Shundubans' history, a key sort of time came in the 1870s when there was a sort of survey by the British. The British loved to do surveys and they did one off Bengal by this guy, W.W. Hunter. And he spent a long time talking about the Shundubans. And for him, maybe it was his Victorian sensibilities, but he was basically, for some reason, saw this area as some magical place of, not magical in a good sense, but a magical place of jungles and beasts and things. So there's a quote by him. But even though he spent like about 100 pages discussing it in this book, he basically just has a passing mention of the people that live there along the same sort of lists which have tigers and snakes and other things. He also just listed that, oh yeah, there are also some people. Why is that important? Because this sort of imagination of the Shunduban remains today in terms of the laws and policies and governance of the Shundubans. The people are just seen as an aside. Around the same time, you also had some changes in terms of how the British managed forestry. So you had the British basically introduce forestry acts, which were not really conservation based. It was based around their interest in maintaining a sustainable supply of forestry for their imperial forestry purposes. And that really impacted the Shundubans because you had a particular part of the forest essentially being said to be protected and a particular past reserved, which meant that people who lived in the forest, all their rights were basically taken away. And essentially these last two quotes that I've put up there summarize the history of the Shunduban, which wasn't just, as I said, an accident of geography, but it was very much sort of political legal kind of production, which engineered the environment that you have even today. And so even in the post-colonial era, the focus has been on this protection of forests from both the national and the global scale. So you see how UNESCO, WWF, others have been very much interested in the protection of the forest, forgetting very much about the people who are there, the human rights of the people who lived there. And I've highlighted there something called the Mora Chapi massacre, which happened in 1977. It should be more than just a bullet point because basically hundreds of refugees who were living on an island were killed by the state because the place was deemed as forest land and they were encroaches, et cetera. But it's a bit of a flash point in terms of when you think about, again, the relationships between humans and the environment and what has been sort of how our assumptions of the environment have been preserved, have sort of produced these results. So moving on then a little bit to how the Shunderman area is administered so that we can then get into how it's governed and how human rights and climate change come into effect today. Essentially, you have the state-level bureaucracy having a big role in the day-to-day lives of people. So irrigation department, health department, et cetera. Again, it's a legacy of kind of these laws which place a lot of emphasis on the state. You have something called the Shunderman's Development Board which was set up in, I think, the early 90s. Before that, there was another one set up in the 70s. And you have these multiple departments which overlap. For example, the Shunderman's Development Board, if you ask them about embankments, they'll say it's not our responsibility. If you ask them about drinking water, they'll say it's not. So it's kind of, they use the fact that there's many people to essentially shift blame and you don't have an overall picture and overall set of principles which govern the area. So how did these play out in terms of different aspects of the relationship today? So three aspects cover one, embankments, which I've talked a little bit about before. Secondly, water, again I've talked a little bit about before. And finally, in terms of disaster relief, rehabilitation and relocation. So firstly, embankments. Obviously, I showed you the picture in terms of how it is visually. So these, the embankments are basically governed by embankment laws which date back to colonial times, the 1880s. And they were last updated in the 1960s. So if you think about new assumptions of climate change and environmental knowledge that we have today, they're well out of date. They place a lot of emphasis on the role of the irrigation department who are seen as the sort of experts on embankments because it's an engineering led kind of engineering led department. But there's a question then in terms of who is the expert because communities are living there and but it's very much top down expert knowledge led governance system. The community's role is essentially limited in a sense because its input can be limited to the irrigation department, for example, hiring someone to be a middleman between the department and the people working on the ground on building these embankments and communities are limited in terms of just providing labor to build these embankments. There's very little oversight in terms of the irrigation department itself in terms of widespread knowledge around corruption that occurs in the irrigation department in terms of there'll be an embankment breach which means a bunch of money comes to the irrigation department, they give it to contractors and each of them take a cut. So there's a saying sort of everybody loves a good drought which a journalist wrote a book about in the same sense everybody loves a good flood. The governments in this sense love a good flood because it means relief money comes in which they can then use in this way. There's also issues of land acquisition from embankment building going back to what I showed you if an embankment is breached because of rising sea levels because of floods and storms a new one is built, more land is taken people's houses, livelihoods again are affected again they move to marginalized sections of society. Embankments are also seen as part of the climate change adaptation framework which means that essentially what the government has said is part of our adaptation for the Shundurbans is to simply keep doing the same thing as we do give more money to the irrigation department to build embankments in this kind of way. So what scope is there for human rights in this? Well one thing that we could start thinking of is how do we change these relationship relations which have produced these material outcomes of climate change in terms of governance so in terms of widening the base of participation of in-embankment governance away from just having ownership of the embankments at the state to making them more of an embankment commons or something like that. So these are the kind of ideas that need to start being thinking of when we start thinking of human rights and climate change. So water, obviously we saw that very, that small clip about access to water issues. The right to water which is recognized in Indian law is primarily concerned with drinking water and that is primarily how the NGOs and the government departments also conceive it so it's definitely focused on providing a tubal at a particular location and saying, okay, 250 people live here, we've provided one tubal and that's our duty is kind of done as long as we check the water every now and then in terms of quality. However what we see on the ground as sort of the videos, et cetera, showed you was that there's a range of things that are missed out because of just doing it in this kind of metric way and kind of seeing human rights in this kind of just turning it into metrics. It becomes blind to the daily power struggles over water but also the multiple uses of water. People are not just using this water for drinking but they need it for sanitation, for health, for livelihoods, et cetera. Is there a place for us to expand our understanding of this human right to water to look at the multiple uses that people have on the ground of water just providing a tubal for every 250 people may not be enough? Finally a little bit about disaster relief, rehabilitation, relocation. The disaster management framework did change about 15 years ago, about 10 years ago I guess and after the tsunami to try and look at things in a more sort of holistic way and West Bengal implemented its own disaster management policy but this was seen as inadequate in terms of some of the things that have happened when cyclones have hit and so human rights in this sense can work towards building an idea of disaster which is more than just sort of relief and more than just providing water pouches and food when there is a cyclone in terms of building sort of some of the pre-disaster frameworks but also more than that the last point I've made there is there space for the everyday disaster and this is important because often there will be an embankment breach or something like that where 10,000 to 20,000 people are impacted but it's still not termed a disaster and sometimes you'll see people will say if only they were lucky they had a cyclone because they got aid relief we didn't get it because it wasn't a disaster framework because it wasn't like that, et cetera so in that sense is there space for providing something for the everyday disasters that we see happening on almost a daily basis in the Shundurans? So Shundurans at the authority the development authority has failed to provide a sort of adequate rehabilitation process interestingly now the World Bank is working with the West Bengal government on having this rehabilitation and relocation plan so often you hear in the international media, et cetera about people having to move because of climate change large-scale migration, et cetera that's exactly what the World Bank is working with the government on in terms and it's a controversial project because it involves relocating an area where there's four and a half million people how do you relocate that while sort of doing it in a way which protects human rights, et cetera and especially in India where you've had rehabilitation sorry relocation is done in a bad way so but that's happening at least in terms of policy circles and the final point that I've made there is what if climate change, loss and damage this is an interesting one because if loss and damage is this thing that you hear is something that's set up under international laws being set up under international climate change law to provide money for essentially where there has been climate change, loss and damage if this was happening in so the same things that are happening on the Bangladesh side of the border it's definitely seen as a climate change, loss and damage issue because of Bangladesh's status as a least developed country but India's obviously a middle developed or whatever you want to call it, it doesn't engage in the same frame in this conversation could there be something similar set up in a national framework, in a regional framework is there space for something like that for an area like the Shundurbans so final thoughts are the relationship between climate change and human rights we've seen how multiple processes are interacting in driving these rights issues it's not a simple case of just saying climate change is happening and therefore people's rights are being breached there are many things happening on the ground which are causing these rights to be breached more so than usual climate change is and will continue to being a major intervening process in this sort of production of water and climate injustice that we see the human rights issues in the Shundurbans can't really be disaggregated from climate change anymore any sort of climate change issues the human rights issues are climate change issues but they're also intertwined with these everyday power relations with the state with other people in the community, et cetera and so this sort of bifurcated approach that we've seen when the environment is seen as separate or as separate from us needs to sort of be challenged and that's kind of what the bigger theoretical point is and to do that one of the ways is to broaden the human rights framework to look at some of these many relationships that are intertwined so when I was talking about the right to water to look at multiple uses of water to look at when we're looking at embankments in the relationship with the government or the state and incorporate this in terms of how we think about human rights today so thank you so any questions otherwise? yeah, thank you very much, really interesting I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you perceive things to perhaps change in the future do you think the regional governors or those who are in charge of it is it just so complex that they can't or there wasn't anything about it and it would continue kind of business as usual or, yeah, it's a kind of Bangladesh side and Bangladesh Delta plan it's quite correct the whole country is a Delta but in your mind, where do you see do you see the momentum building for changes in how they treat human rights? yeah yeah, it's obviously no, it's obviously different from what I hear I've not been to the Bangladesh side but from whatever I hear even from international NGOs who are working there, etc it's a very different space for good and bad reasons in terms of overall, what tends to happen in a way is that some big event happens and then there's some changes so that Cyclone Isla, which I showed provided some changes but it also, overall, obviously, it's not a good thing I'm not saying that at all it was hugely, completely changed the sort of lives of people there and it's always brought up in conversation as a sort of tipping point but sometimes those events maybe see changes happening apart from that, it really it's very hard because you don't really have you have a lot of NGOs operating but you don't really have as many sort of people's movements who are working towards changes outside of sort of just the charity and your sort of structure yeah, yeah, the right to housing adequate standard of living are both included as far as I know Rupa might be able to but yeah, they have been read in the same way as the Supreme Court has read in the right to water, the right to food, etc so it has been recognized under Indian law there's a bigger question about how it's sort of implemented on a day-to-day level and also sometimes a lot of these rights have seen them implement like the courts have read them in but has there been further legislative changes which is to align it with the human rights so the Supreme Court might say that there's a human right to water but how much have the laws around water that operate aligned with an understanding of the human right to water in the same with housing yeah, Rupa and then which islands get which communities get access to a lot of houses yeah, yeah have you lent it out to them? no, I didn't, I mean it's quite obviously complex and I didn't leave it out because it's how much can you sort of build in, one, I mean I saw this playing out in my own fieldwork if I can give an example from that in terms of the areas which had embankments and some of the areas which didn't and interesting, I asked someone in the government about this thing, I visited this area why did they not have an embankment that this happened and he said well, that community, we tried 10 years ago they stole everything, blah blah so they're not getting an embankment because of this so it again goes into showing these sort of multiple processes that are at play it's not simply a case of climate change in human rights in a linear kind of way it's so differentiated based on gender, caste, tribal there's a huge, I didn't go into the history as much as I could have but there's a huge tribal population there which were brought by the British to clear the forest essentially so going back to what the British imagination of the Shundurans was it was seen as this wild place well, who are the people who are capable of sort of dealing with this wild, crazy place we'll get the tribals who we think are wild and crazy to come, so they were brought from another area in Bengal yeah, so you mentioned that relocation has been really complicated in this place and like yeah, it's really difficult to relocate like a million of people but I was wondering what do you think if maybe relocation could be like an effective measure yeah yeah if it's properly relocated no, I mean I think to some extent I think relocation needs to be they have to plan around it because it is happening on a day-to-day basis anyway people's people's sort of land is going and they're either going more inland or they're moving somewhere else etc, so to some extent it needs to be thought of it's just how they do it has to be very sensitive to so many different issues and how it's been done in the past and has been documented and for other things has not been done very well so as I said the World Bank is thinking about this WWF is into this kind of idea so they've released plans but there's a lot of mistrust between well, between different NGOs working on this so if you ask some of the other NGOs they're saying, well we don't agree with WWF on this because they're doing this but at the same time they're doing rural electrification plans if they don't believe people should be here they don't trust the WWF also because of its history with conservation etc so there's a lot of sensitivities about this but it kind of needs to be thought about because it's happening already the dynamics of the tourists and then and really access things like land and water and the inequality what you thought about like tourists taking limited resources and how tourism is actually encouraged rather than discouraged and then also that thing is the dynamic of like the idea of a national park and a pristine environment being preserved at the expense of human rights tying in with the large Jaffa massacre and people like WWF and conservation ideology and the right of the tiger over the right of the human and the compasses will be like sort of the tourist revenue and comes out of human rights sorry, just as a background is that something that you are researching? The Shunemans or is that something that you just picked up from there? I've spent these three but I spent a lot of time there ah, okay yeah, no that's exactly I mean ecotourism is now being promoted on a large scale by the government and seen as some kind of thing that will save the area almost and it's not done while there's like big problems with where they're building things in terms of breaches of coastal zone notifications and sort of building on very fragile lands which where they shouldn't be building things and so again it goes back to this perception that is this sort of perception that is perpetuated about the Shundurans being this wild, pristine thing and people as soon as you tell someone in Calcutta that you're going to the Shundurans they just have this magical sparkle in their eyes that you're going to see a tiger or something like that and they forget that there's four and a half million people there who live in some of the most marginal sections so again it's another sort of I mean I haven't looked at the tourism side as much but you see it as another sort of angle of this dichotomy between human environment and yet the way we think about humans and the environment okay Okay Very specific thing in the World Bank project are we relocating people before their project out of their own home so They have some so I from what I understand of it they have three sort of categories of people and so it's three categories of land and so some people they want to look at before some people it's kind of they want to persuade to like in a more sort of give them options to relocate and then the other part is the stable embankment which is sort of they want to increase livelihoods et cetera to keep people well maintain some sort of sustainability there that's sort of what they've what they said in terms of relocation today at here so before does that make sense So some people have been told to move Yeah I think from what I've read about it et cetera it's also based on this idea like there's this like there's in the Netherlands when they were building the embankments they kind of really persuaded people to move in that kind of gentle not more than gentle persuasion how it actually gets played out maybe more than just more than gentle but that's kind of why there's all this sensitivity around it places which are like at imminent flooding levels just like more in land but in the same like mangrove area but it's obviously a lot of the relocation that happened during the marriage I feel kind of here was to cities yeah generations and generations in this area and they weren't helped they got to cities they were given you know a little bit of cash and left there and that's a huge of their human rights there's from nothing on there was nothing they could do and they just thrown into a city and directly like start to die because that's not there yeah I they talked about relocating them within the same kind of within the environment from so from the limited conversation that I had with the that's in that WWF it seemed to be more at sort of places like sorry well I said WWF because World Bank is working with WWF and I met the WWF people in the children ones it was to place like canning and other sort of stable delta so yeah away from but that creates a big issue because canning is very different or these areas are very different to the areas that they live in so it was yeah I mean I don't know how much specificity they have in terms of their plan yet but it's definitely something that is it about relocating them because of imminent like flooding to their homes and the potential that they restore it or more about more space for the the love type of thing? uh no from what at least what's said was it's more to do with climate change threats but assuming that what they want to create is a buffer zone in terms of if you want yes if you see the delta they want to create a buffer zone where people are not there so question about because the similar ones are spread over not just in the World Bank or the West Bengal government more largely leaving the government for the relocation because of I mean the fact happened everywhere and it's natural that it's along the border they cross the border yeah that happens a lot then it becomes a question of right you mean people who've crossed the border from Bangladesh living in the Indian Chunderbunds and what happens to them if there's relocation um or do you mean they've been in India anywhere like but they've crossed over or will be crossing anywhere because yeah no I don't think there's been any sort of not that I know of in terms of specifically looking at Bangladeshi um refugees who've come across um I don't know if anyone else has uh sorry they're all over India yeah they're all over including and they haven't been the fans yet no yeah yeah and it's it's historic because there are different waves of people from Bangladesh coming to the Chunderbunds um and actually yeah it's better I mean because the knowledge is the fact that there should be a migration I don't think that we could just close the eyes and say that yeah I don't think they've I thought yeah no I agree completely it needs to be or there needs to be but uh regional solution but then it becomes a sort of geopolitical issue um so yeah does it but does it even recognize refugees as such yeah I mean it's not a have they signed they've not signed the refugee convention as far as you know but they use it for certain refugees Tibetan or that's but climate refugees I don't I don't think they have yeah no it's yeah I don't yeah I I suspect that's they haven't or they want unfortunately but yeah okay sorry you had a question I don't think about what you were saying like I think it's really cool for much to say just climate refugees because there are so few people that are internal displays so it has been like it's really useful I think for for for yeah there are a lot of people that are displayed just yeah yeah I mean there's an I mean if you look at the the Indian side the amount of migration out of the Shundor ones because of climate because essentially because of climate change and other impacts as I've shown here you can't disaggregate it from other things that are going on but the fact that you know in every house there'll be some family members working in other parts of India sending money home is because of these things right and yeah and I guess in Bangladesh they cross over because they don't have this massive sort of country to go into other parts of yeah thank you very much