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More than a climate story<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Water sustains life, biodiversity, human well-being and the continuity of cultures, and almost everywhere its systems are under pressure. A warming climate, rising seas, floods and cyclones act together with dams, sluice gates, embankments and the policies behind them. The effects reach beyond the quantity and quality of water to the ecological, social and institutional relationships through which people obtain, use and govern it. Coastal regions feel this most sharply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The southwestern coast of Bangladesh is one of the places where climate change is already an everyday matter. Salinity, flooding, waterlogging, extreme heat and seasonal shortages of fresh water have become ordinary features of life there. Sea-level rise, cyclones and storm surges push salt water inland. Rainfall has become harder to predict, and hotter summers dry out the ponds that many households rely on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Climate is only part of the explanation, though. For decades, the coast has also been reshaped by embankments, sluice gates, upstream dams, aquaculture and changing land use (Dewan et al., 2015). Much of this was built to protect land or to raise harvests. It also altered tidal flows, sediment movement and drainage, and it has been linked to recurring waterlogging, rising salinity and a shortage of fresh water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The water availability on this coast is therefore the combined result of climate, engineering, land use and political decisions. Scarcity of this kind is partly made by people, which also means that people can do something about it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The burden is also unevenly shared. Having water close by does not guarantee safe or fair access to it. That depends on who owns the land and the infrastructure, who is represented politically, and on income, mobility, gender, and cultural or Indigenous identity. Water scarcity is a physical shortage, and it is also a social and political condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One bath, three kinds of water<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Each of the three waters has its own qualities, risks, and uses, and women choose between them according to what is available and what each does to the body. Salinity limits what the nearest water can be used for. Irregular rainfall decides how much rainwater can be collected and stored. Extreme summer heat raises demand, speeds up evaporation, and empties the ponds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For the women we met, climate change is not mainly a matter of scientific projections, or even of disasters. They experience it through the water they can reach and save, and through the compromises their bodies make when there is not enough fresh water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Who waits at the pond?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
In most households on this coast, as in much of the Global South, collecting, storing and rationing water is women’s work. When fresh water runs short, that work grows. It means more unpaid hours, more physical strain, poorer health, less freedom of movement, and more reliance on sources that nobody fully trusts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Access is also governed by customs. In the hottest months, most ponds dry up, and a village may be left with one or two that still hold water. Women and men do not usually bathe there at the same time, and men generally go first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Women are left with whatever time and privacy remain, and sometimes they postpone bathing altogether. During menstruation, when more water and more privacy are needed, this is a real hardship. The heat empties the pond, and custom decides who has to wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For this reason, water realities cannot be treated as purely technical or infrastructural problems. Access also runs through social norms, relations within the household, institutional practice, and unequal power over decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The three-water bath is the work of someone who knows her environment in detail. Women here can judge how salty a source is, how its quality shifts with the season, how long stored rainwater must last, and which water the body will tolerate. Research on gender and water in Bangladesh has described this kind of everyday expertise for years (Sultana, 2009).<\/p>\n\n\n\n This knowledge comes from daily contact with rainfall, pond levels, salinity, storage, and the reactions of their own bodies. It tells them which waters are available, how their quality is changing, what each can be used for, and how a shortage can be managed for a while. Their relationship with water is at once bodily, domestic, productive, emotional and political.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It would be a mistake to admire it as successful adaptation. Washing in salt water and rationing rain is coping under constraint, and the body pays for it. Rob Nixon’s term ”slow violence” fits well: harm that builds up gradually and out of sight, with no single disaster to put in the news (Nixon, 2013).<\/p>\n\n\n\n What looks like resilience is also evidence of what is missing: a safe, reliable and fair supply of fresh water. Women meet the needs of the day, but they have neither the resources nor the institutional authority to change the conditions that produce the shortage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The deeper problem is that responsibility and influence are held by different people. Women manage the water day to day, yet they seldom have a voice when embankments, sluice gates or water schemes are planned (Zwarteveen & Meinzen-Dick, 2001). Their responsibility for water brings no matching rights, recognition or influence, and they carry the consequences of decisions they had no part in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coastal Bangladesh is an early case of something larger. According to WHO and UNICEF, one person in four worldwide, about 2.1 billion people, still lacks access to safely managed drinking water (WHO, 2025). Salinity is also a growing concern on many other low-lying coasts as seas rise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The three-water bath carries a lesson that holds in any country. Counting liters per person tells us little about who actually gets water, when, and at what cost. That depends on infrastructure, ownership, custom, and on who is heard when decisions are made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Researchers have written about much of this. Outside academic and specialist circles, however, the everyday ways in which women sort, combine, and save different waters remain largely unseen. So does the question of whether climate adaptation and water governance recognize what these women know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Climate adaptation is now being planned everywhere, globally. The question from the pond applies to all of it: whose knowledge counts when the plans are drawn up, and who is left to cope with what the plans overlook?<\/p>\n\n\n\n A woman who has learned to make one bath out of three waters knows things about her coast that no salinity map records. She should be heard when its future is decided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shahid Mallick; Priya Sharma<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Shahidul Mallick – UEFConnect<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Priya Sharma – UEFConnect<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Dewan, C., Mukherji, A., & Buisson, M.-C. (2015). Evolution of water management in coastal Bangladesh: From temporary earthen embankments to depoliticized community-managed polders. Water International, 40(3), 401\u2013416.https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/02508060.2015.1025196<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Nixon, R. (2013). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor<\/em>. Harvard University Press. https:\/\/www.hup.harvard.edu\/books\/9780674072343<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sultana, F. (2009). Fluid lives: Subjectivities, gender and water in rural Bangladesh. Gender, Place & Culture, 16(4), 427\u2013444. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1080\/09663690903003942<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n WHO & UNICEF (2025). Progress on Household Drinking Water and Sanitation 2000\u20132024: special focus on inequalities<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Women](\"https:\/\/blogs.uef.fi\/kaikkihimassa\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/71\/2026\/10\/Photo2_Women-and-Children-walaking-to-collect-water-1024x768.jpg\")
Knowledge without a say<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Why this matters far from the delta<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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References<\/h3>\n\n\n\n