As climate change intensifies, millions are displaced by rising seas, extreme weather, and collapsing livelihoods. Yet the connection between climate-induced migration and human trafficking remains largely overlooked. Global crises, particularly in the Sundarbans along the India–Bangladesh border, push vulnerable communities into cycles of displacement and exploitation. This underscores the urgent need for intersectional policies that link climate adaptation with protection against trafficking.
Despite the growing reality of climate-induced displacement, there is currently no international legal definition of climate-related migration, and “climate refugees” remain unrecognized under existing refugee law, leaving environmentally displaced persons without formal protection or asylum rights.
The subsequent nexus between climate migration and human trafficking is often overlooked in global and national policy frameworks, leaving protection and early warning systems inadequate. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the first time the issue of human trafficking during natural disasters came into the spotlight. The two major cyclones affecting India and Bangladesh, Sidr (2007) and Aila (2009), as well as Typhoon Haiyan (2013) in the Philippines and the earthquakes in Nepal (2015), demonstrate clear links between natural disasters and surges in trafficking. Research from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and Anti-Slavery International shows that environmental crises, such as droughts in northern Ghana, push vulnerable populations, especially women, into exploitative labor and debt bondage. Urgent policy action is needed to address trafficking, specifically within climate-related migration responses.
The Case of the Dynamic Sundarbans
While the Sundarbans is a celebrated UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the world’s largest mangrove ecosystems, it is also an ecologically fragile and climate-vulnerable region. Spread across the ecologically porous borders of India and Bangladesh, the area has faced repeated natural disasters over the past few decades, pushing many residents to migrate in search of safety and livelihoods.
After the Cyclones Sidr and Aila, some residents were forced to leave their homes to find work elsewhere, while their families survived on a trickle of remittances. However, this fragile balance was shattered by Cyclone Amphan in May 2020, a Category 5 super cyclone that struck the Bengal delta in India and Bangladesh amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the pandemic caused widespread job losses across cities, thousands of migrant workers returned to the Sundarbans. This reverse migration created a humanitarian crisis. With livelihoods destroyed, health facilities inadequate, and land rendered infertile by saltwater intrusion, many families faced extreme precarity. As a report from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) notes, the possibility of seeking work outside the region once a key coping mechanism became increasingly bleak.
The vulnerability of the deltaic Sundarbans region, where land and water are in constant negotiation, arises from both climate change and the region’s fragile geology. Sea levels are rising not only due to global warming—melting ice and thermal expansion—but also because the delta itself is sinking, a natural process known as deltaic subsidence. This adds an extra 3–8 mm of sea-level rise annually, making the area far more flood-prone than the global average. Compounding this, the Bay of Bengal’s sea surface temperature has risen by 0.5°C per decade since 1980, much faster than the global rate of 0.06°C, fueling stronger cyclones and accelerating coastal erosion. Studies show this warming trend exceeds that of the Arabian Sea, leaving India’s eastern coast especially exposed to high-intensity storms.
As writer Amitav Ghosh notes in his book The Great Derangement, the Sundarbans is a “landscape so dynamic that its very changeability leads to innumerable moments of recognition.” This environmental volatility directly shapes human movement. As rising seas and repeated cyclones erode land and livelihoods, migration becomes both a necessity and a coping strategy, one that increasingly intersects with issues of inequality and exploitation.
The need to reframe climate migration with an intersectional approach
Migration is often a household strategy to diversify income and reduce vulnerability when agricultural livelihoods fail. Yet when undertaken under duress and without institutional support, migration can worsen inequality, social dislocation, and the risk of exploitation, including human trafficking. Globally, climate-induced migration has profound social consequences. In the Sundarbans, for example, a 2010 study found that 20% of households had at least one child migrant laborer. Families rarely move together; instead, children are sent to cities to earn income, a coping strategy that exposes them to trafficking and exploitation. Over the past decade, this has only intensified, taking on new dimensions of modern slavery.
Both sudden-onset disasters, such as cyclones and floods, and slow-onset crises, including sea-level rise and land degradation, continue to force people to migrate in search of livelihoods or survival, often exposing them to exploitation and trafficking. International climate policies have largely prioritized mitigation and adaptation over loss and damage. Although discussions at forums such as COP27 and agreements such as the Santiago Framework have begun to consider financing for climate impacts, displacement remains inadequately addressed.
The cyclical relationship between climate change and trafficking is particularly alarming. Environmental shocks exacerbate economic and social vulnerabilities, increasing the risk of all forms of modern slavery, including debt bondage, forced labor, and sexual exploitation. At the same time, exploitative labor practices contribute to environmental degradation and higher emissions, further fueling the climate crisis.
Effective responses require adopting intersectionality as an analytical framework, one that integrates strategies to address both climate adaptation and human trafficking simultaneously, and is supported by robust research and data collection to fill current knowledge gaps. Without integrated legal frameworks, protective policies, and targeted interventions, climate-induced migration will continue to expose millions of vulnerable people to exploitation, perpetuating a cycle of environmental and social harm.
