At least 50 people have died this week as Bangladesh wrestles with yet another monsoon. Around 35,000 have moved into shelters, while more than a million people remain stranded across seven districts. With the rain forecast to continue, the situation may take a turn for the worse.
Meanwhile, relief teams are taking food, water and medicine by boat to communities cut off by damaged roads. Bangladesh is rightly credited with building an effective cyclone-warning and evacuation system. However, the present emergency shows why that achievement cannot be treated as a complete model for every hazard.
Flash floods, landslides and urban waterlogging are shaped as much by drainage, settlement and enforcement as by the intensity of rain. A warning is of little use where roads disappear, hillsides collapse or floodwater has nowhere to go.
Local reporting has identified how in parts of south Chattogram and Cox’s Bazar, sluice gates on rivers and channels were allegedly kept shut by owners of fish and shrimp enclosures; preventing floodwater in the hills from draining into the Bay of Bengal.
Deaths in the Rohingya camps further underline the human cost of criminal neglect. More than 1.2 million refugees live in crowded settlements, many on unstable, deforested hillsides. Bangladesh cannot be expected to bear that burden alone, particularly as humanitarian funding weakens.
Pakistan knows this tragic pattern frighteningly well. The 2022 floods affected 33 million people, displaced nearly eight million and caused more than $30 billion in damage and economic losses. Since then, climate language has become more prominent, but municipal maintenance, land-use control and district-level prevention measures remain uneven. Repeated flooding after even moderate rainfall shows how encroachments on natural drains turn a weather event into a governance failure.
For both countries, climate change cannot become an alibi for decisions that increase exposure. Disaster management begins before emergency agencies mobilise-in waterways, enforced building rules, maintained drains, and local authorities able to act on forecasts.
Bangladesh’s immediate priority is relief. The inquiry that follows should examine response times, changes to the landscape, failures of enforcement and the reasons known risks were allowed to metamorphose into another deadly, preventable emergency. *