Mangrove Resilience
Neelambari Phalkey
Related terms: Resilience, Resilient Practices
Introduction
Nestled between India and Bangladesh, the Sundarbans is the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest, spanning over 10,000 square kilometres (Giri et al., 2015). It harbours unparalleled biodiversity and sustains dense human populations whose lives are intricately tied to its resources (Hassan et al., 2019). Yet, the region sits at one of the epicentres of the climate crisis. Rising sea levels, intensifying cyclones, and salinity intrusion are testing the limits of its ecological and social systems (Payo et al., 2016; Dasgupta et al., 2018).
In the context of such challenges, resilience – a concept often described as the capacity to ‘bounce back’ – demands a deeper interrogation (Folke, 2016). In the Sundarbans, resilience is neither static nor singular. It is an evolving process, rooted in the interplay of human agency, ecological ingenuity, and cultural imagination. This essay seeks to reframe resilience, drawing on the metaphors, embodied experiences, stories, and sensory dimensions that define life in the Sundarbans.
Resilience as a Metaphor: The Mangrove as Teacher
The mangroves of the Sundarbans serve as a powerful metaphor for resilience. Their intricate root systems anchor them in shifting tidal landscapes, enabling them to absorb shocks from cyclones and storm surges (Alongi, 2016; Hogarth, 2015). These natural defences shield coastal communities, embodying resilience not as resistance but as adaptive flexibility.
For the people of the Sundarbans, mangroves are both a resource and a guide. Following Cyclone Aila in 2009, women’s collectives spearheaded reforestation efforts, planting thousands of mangroves to protect their villages from the effects of future storms (Roy, 2019; Mukhopadhyay, 2016). This act was both practical and symbolic – a reclamation of agency in the face of climate uncertainty.
Globally, mangroves are celebrated for their role as ‘blue carbon’ ecosystems, as they store significant amounts of carbon dioxide (Donato et al., 2011). However, their social dimensions often remain overshadowed. Communities in the Sundarbans have internalised the mangroves’ lessons: survival requires interdependence, adaptability, and innovation.
Embodied Definitions: Living Resilience
In the Sundarbans, resilience is not an abstract concept – it is lived and embodied. The daily practices of fishing, farming, and maintaining embankments are acts of negotiation with an unpredictable environment (O’Donnell & Wodon, 2015). These practices are so central because the Sundarbans’ fragile ecology and exposure to cyclones, tidal surges, and salinity leave little space for passive endurance. Survival depends on continuous bodily engagement with land and water, making resilience inseparable from lived routines. Compounding this is the widespread out-migration of men to other states in India or abroad for work, which leaves women and older family members to shoulder the immediate demands of sustaining households in the face of ecological uncertainty. For example, farmers experiment with salt-tolerant rice varieties to combat soil salinity, adapting traditional agricultural practices to contemporary challenges (Sengupta, 2023).
Gendered dimensions of resilience are particularly pronounced. With men absent for long stretches of time, women take the lead in managing homes, cultivating land, and organising collective survival strategies. They are often the first responders to environmental shocks, securing water, repairing homes, and ensuring food supplies (Roy, 2019; Karmakar, 2022). In the absence of state and market safety nets, women’s labour and knowledge become frontline resources for resilience. Initiatives such as women-led crab farming collectives exemplify how resilience involves not only enduring hardship but actively reimagining livelihoods. Beyond these visible enterprises, women also sustain less recognised forms of adaptation – such as repairing breached embankments, maintaining seed banks for future planting, and sharing food and care across households after disasters. Yet, this feminised resilience often remains invisible in policy discourses, which continue to privilege male farmers or fishers as the archetypal subjects of adaptation.
For instance, top-down embankment projects funded by government agencies have sometimes failed to reduce vulnerability because they ignored women’s local knowledge of tides, seasonal patterns, and maintenance practices, highlighting the costs of overlooking their contributions. This mirrors broader feminist critiques of invisible labour, where women’s contributions to survival, care, and social reproduction are central yet systematically undervalued or overlooked. This dynamic highlights a key feminist insight: resilience is neither neutral nor evenly distributed, but produced through unequal gendered relations of care, survival, and innovation.
This embodied experience of resilience resonates with fields like human geography, which emphasise lived realities over technocratic frameworks (Cote & Nightingale, 2012). It underscores that resilience is not merely an outcome but a continuous process of learning, improvising, and transforming – often led by women whose actions redefine what it means to live with crisis. Recognising and valuing this invisible labour is therefore essential, not only for understanding resilience in the Sundarbans but also for shaping just and effective climate adaptation policies.
Storytelling: Narratives of Survival and Adaptation
The stories emerging from the Sundarbans are testaments to the ability of humans to adapt to a changing environment. A fisherman who lost his boat to Cyclone Amphan in 2020 joined a cooperative to access shared resources. A farmer shifted from rice cultivation to honey collection after salinity rendered her fields infertile (Dasgupta et al., 2018). These narratives go beyond personal triumphs, offering a repository of collective wisdom.
Storytelling also plays a crucial role in preserving and transmitting resilience strategies. Elders share cyclone preparedness techniques and indigenous ecological knowledge with younger generations, ensuring that adaptive practices persist (Islam & Walkerden, 2014). Oral traditions, rich in the Sundarbans, transform survival strategies into communal memory.
Comparatively, the stories of other deltaic regions, such as the Mekong or Mississippi, reveal shared patterns of adaptation (McInnes et al., n.d.). However, they also highlight the specificities of the Sundarbans’ socio-ecological context, emphasising the need for localised approaches to resilience.
Sensory Definitions: The Soundscape of Resilience
The Sundarbans pulsates with sound, creating a sensory dimension to resilience that is often overlooked. The rustling of mangrove leaves, the calls of birds, and the rhythmic splashes of fishers’ nets form an auditory tapestry that signals the health of the ecosystem (Battistini, 2018). These sounds are more than ambient – they are indicators of life’s rhythms and the ecosystem’s resilience.
During cyclones, the soundscape shifts dramatically. The howling winds and creaking embankments evoke both fear and readiness, serving as natural alarms for communities. For those living in the Sundarbans, sound is a medium of survival, a visceral connection to their environment.
Sound mapping projects could amplify the sensory dimensions of resilience, making abstract concepts tangible (LaBelle, 2020; Castell et al., 2024). By engaging with these soundscapes, policymakers, scientists, and artists can develop a more empathetic understanding of climate impacts. Globally, acoustic ecology, such as Bernie Krause’s “biophony,” shows how ecosystem disruption alters soundscapes. In India, community projects like Soundscapes of Sundarbans record local sound environments to strengthen conservation awareness (Duhautpas et al., 2014). Sound artists such as Hildegard Westerkamp highlight how listening fosters ecological consciousness (Duhautpas et al., 2014).
Sound, unlike visual cues that can be obstructed or ignored, envelops the listener and demands embodied engagement. It travels across distances, penetrates barriers, and connects people to environments even when they remain unseen. This immersive quality makes sound particularly potent for transformative practices: it cultivates attentiveness, generates affective responses, and collapses the distance between observer and environment. Listening becomes a way of cultivating presence, attunement, and vulnerability – qualities essential for rethinking resilience not just as adaptation, but as a relational practice.
Sound, as an embodied sensory practice, sharpens environmental attunement and collective preparedness. Listening becomes both a survival skill and a cultural act of care, fostering intergenerational knowledge-sharing and redefining resilience as a relational, multi-sensory practice.
Object-Based Interpretation: The Embankment as Symbol
Embankments in the Sundarbans are physical embodiments of resilience. These earthen walls protect against tidal surges, symbolising collective labour and community strength. Yet, they also expose resilience’s limitations: Cyclone Amphan breached hundreds of kilometres of embankments, flooding homes and fields with saline water. (Dasgupta et al., 2018).
This duality – protection and vulnerability – underscores the tensions inherent in resilience. It also highlights the interplay between top-down interventions, such as government-built embankments, and bottom-up efforts, like community-led repairs (Sanchez-Triana et al., 2014). Resilience, in this context, becomes a site of negotiation between external policies and local agency.
Temporal Perspectives: Resilience Across Time
Resilience in the Sundarbans is deeply temporal, informed by historical experiences and future uncertainties. Traditional practices, like planting indigenous mangrove species, reflect generations of accumulated wisdom. Simultaneously, modern technologies like solar-powered pumps point to forward-looking adaptation (Ortolano et al., 2017).
This temporal dimension also reveals contradictions. Shrimp farming, for instance, offers immediate economic benefits but accelerates soil salinisation, undermining long-term sustainability (Paul & Vogl, 2011). Navigating such trade-offs requires a temporal balance, integrating short-term gains with long-term resilience.
Contradictions and Paradoxes: Fragility within Strength
The Sundarbans encapsulates the paradox of resilience: it is both a bastion of adaptation and a hotspot of vulnerability (Payo et al., 2016). Communities that rebuild after every cyclone often lack basic services like healthcare, illustrating the coexistence of resilience and fragility.
Acknowledging these contradictions challenges simplistic narratives of resilience as invulnerability. It calls for a nuanced understanding that recognises resilience as a dynamic interplay of strengths and vulnerabilities (Cote & Nightingale, 2012).
A Call to Rethink Resilience
Resilience is often framed as a technical concept, focusing on the capacity of systems to recover from disturbances. While this perspective is valuable, it fails to capture the lived experiences of communities such as those in the Sundarbans. This unique socio-ecological system invites us to reimagine resilience not as a static goal but as a dynamic, relational, and multidimensional process.
The Sundarbans offers a rich and layered perspective for redefining resilience. Its metaphors, embodied experiences, stories, soundscapes, and temporal paradoxes reveal resilience as a process of transformation, creativity, and coexistence with uncertainty. This interplay of ecological and cultural dimensions highlights resilience as deeply interwoven with the rhythms and realities of life on the frontlines of climate change.
Policymakers must recognise the importance of integrating traditional knowledge with scientific innovation to craft integrated responses to climate challenges. Academics need to embrace interdisciplinary approaches that delve into the complexities of resilience, exploring it as more than just recovery but as a journey toward adaptation and coexistence. Artists, too, have a vital role here, drawing from the Sundarbans’ sensory and symbolic richness to create narratives that inspire empathy and action.
Resilience as Coexistence with Uncertainty
The Sundarbans exemplify resilience as coexistence with uncertainty. The region’s tidal rhythms, shifting riverbanks, and volatile weather systems are not anomalies but inherent characteristics of the deltaic landscape (Payo et al., 2016). For the people of the Sundarbans, adapting to these uncertainties is not about returning to a previous state but finding ways to thrive within flux (Islam & Walkerden, 2014). This adaptive capacity is built into cultural practices, such as the careful timing of agricultural cycles to align with tidal movements or the use of indigenous knowledge to read and predict storm patterns.
Globally, the growing unpredictability of climate change mirrors the Sundarbans’ experience. This underscores the need to embrace resilience as an ongoing negotiation with uncertainty, rather than a fixed endpoint (Langsdorf et al., n.d.). It is a call to move away from rigid models of resilience that focus solely on structural solutions, such as embankments or cyclone shelters, and toward more flexible, adaptive strategies that can evolve.
Resilience as Relational
In the Sundarbans, resilience is not an individual or isolated phenomenon but a deeply relational one. The mangroves, rivers, animals, and people form a web of interdependences, where the well-being of one affects the others (Berkes et al., 2000). For example, the health of mangroves directly influences fish populations, which in turn sustain local livelihoods (Alongi, 2016). Similarly, the community’s collective maintenance of embankments and shared survival strategies during cyclones highlight the relational nature of resilience.
Rethinking resilience requires recognising and nurturing these interconnections. Policymakers must go beyond fragmented interventions to consider the cascading impacts of their decisions across social and ecological systems (Folke, 2016). Similarly, fostering relational resilience means empowering communities as stewards of their environments, rather than relegating them to passive beneficiaries of external aid.
Resilience as Transformation
Resilience in the Sundarbans is not merely about preserving the status quo but about transformation. Communities here are constantly innovating to address the twin pressures of environmental degradation and economic marginalisation (Sanchez-Triana et al., 2014). For instance, experiments with saline-tolerant crops and sustainable aquaculture represent transformative adaptations that reimagine human-environment relationships (Dasgupta et al., 2018).
This transformative lens has global relevance. It challenges the narrow focus on recovery in disaster management and adaptation frameworks, urging a shift toward creating opportunities for systemic change. In urban settings, this could mean rethinking infrastructure design to prioritise nature-based solutions, while in rural areas, it could involve reimagining agricultural systems to balance productivity with ecological health (Langsdorf et al., n.d.).
The Role of Creativity in Rethinking Resilience
The Sundarbans demonstrates that resilience is as much a cultural and creative process as it is a scientific or technical one. Art, storytelling, and sensory experiences play a vital role in how communities make sense of and respond to climate challenges (Gabrys & Yusoff, 2012). From songs that recount the dangers of venturing into tiger territory to folk art depicting the protective power of mangroves, creative expressions foster emotional resilience and community solidarity.
Integrating creativity into global resilience strategies can offer new ways to engage diverse audiences and inspire collective action. For example, participatory art projects that visualise sea-level rise or community theatre performances about climate adaptation can bridge the gap between abstract data and lived experiences. Participatory art projects like HighWaterLine in the U.S. visualise future flood zones, turning data into engagement (Chen, 2025) & (Lee, 2021). In Bangladesh, BRAC’s Popular Theatre embeds disaster preparedness into local cultural idioms. NGOs in the Sundarbans have collaborated with women’s self-help groups on wall paintings and performances blending folklore with climate education (O’Donnell & Wodon, 2015).
Recognising non-human agency further expands resilience thinking. Mangroves, rivers, and animals act as “creative actors”, shaping resilience through adaptive behaviour (Haraway, 2016). For example, mangrove roots “design” protection that humans emulate in infrastructure planning. Creativity thus becomes a shared process across species and environments.
Resilience and Justice
Rethinking resilience must also address the critical question of justice. In the Sundarbans, resilience is shaped by inequities in access to resources, decision-making, and opportunities. Marginalised groups, including women, indigenous communities, and landless labourers, often bear disproportionate burdens while contributing the least to the climate crisis (Ortolano et al., 2017). True resilience cannot exist without equity; it requires dismantling systemic barriers and ensuring that adaptation efforts prioritise the most vulnerable (Schlosberg, 2013).
Globally, climate resilience frameworks often perpetuate injustices by prioritising wealthier nations or regions over those most affected by climate change. The Sundarbans reminds us that resilience must be inclusive, centring the voices and needs of those on the frontlines of the crisis. This justice-centred approach calls for a redistribution of resources, knowledge, and power, enabling marginalised communities to lead their own adaptation journeys.
Toward a Holistic Framework for Resilience
The lessons from the Sundarbans point to the need for a holistic framework that integrates ecological, social, cultural, and temporal dimensions of resilience (Berkes et al., 2000). Such a framework would prioritise:
- Ecological health: Protecting and restoring ecosystems that form the foundation of resilience.
- Social equity: Addressing the structural inequalities that shape vulnerability and adaptation capacity.
- Cultural significance: Valuing traditional knowledge, storytelling, and creative practices as integral to resilience.
- Long-term sustainability: Balancing immediate needs with strategies that ensure intergenerational resilience.
This holistic vision aligns with global frameworks such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which emphasise the interconnectedness of environmental, social, and economic resilience. However, operationalising this vision requires a shift in mindset – from seeing resilience as a technical challenge to embracing it as a multidimensional, dynamic process.
The Global Relevance of the Sundarbans
The Sundarbans is not an isolated case but a microcosm of the broader challenges and opportunities in building climate resilience. Coastal cities like Jakarta, Lagos, and New York face similar threats from rising seas, while agricultural regions worldwide grapple with changing rainfall patterns and soil degradation (Langsdorf et al., n.d.). The adaptive strategies emerging from the Sundarbans – rooted in relationality, transformation, and justice – offer a blueprint for resilience in diverse contexts.
Moreover, the Sundarbans highlights the importance of learning from frontline communities. These communities possess invaluable knowledge and practices that can inform global climate adaptation efforts. By centring their voices, we can move toward more inclusive and effective resilience frameworks.
Conclusion
The Sundarbans invites us to rethink resilience as a multifaceted, human, and ecological process. It challenges us to go beyond simplistic notions of recovery and instead embrace resilience as a journey of adaptation, transformation, and coexistence. By learning from the Sundarbans’ ecosystems, communities, and creative expressions, we can craft resilience strategies that are not only robust but also just and inclusive.
As the climate crisis accelerates, the Sundarbans offers a vision of hope rooted in the interplay of ecological wisdom, cultural creativity, and social solidarity. In rethinking resilience through the lens of the Sundarbans, we can equip ourselves to face the uncertainties of a changing world with courage, innovation, and compassion.
Bibliography
Alongi, D. M. 2016. “Mangroves.” Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series, 393-404.
Battistini, E. 2018. “The Human-Animal Relationship and the Musical Metaphor in The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause.” In Semiotics of Animals in Culture. Zoosemiotics 2.0, edited by G. Marrone and D. Mangano, 209-21. New York: Springer.
Berkes, F., J. Colding and C. Folke. 2000. Rediscovery of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as adaptive management. Ecological Applications 10(5).
Castell, J. et al. 2024. “Sound of Nature: Soundscapes and Environmental Awareness, 1750-1950. Journal of Literature and Science 17(2).
Chen, M.-H. 2025. “Urban Encounters: Climate Art and the Public.” Calle 14 Revista de Investigación En El Campo Del Arte 20(38): 123-36.
Cote, M. and A. J. Nightingale. 2012. “Resilience thinking meets social theory.” Progress in Human Geography 36(4): 475-89.
Dasgupta, S., M. M. Hossain, M. Huq and D. Wheeler. 2018. “Climate Change, Salinization and High-Yield Rice Production in Coastal Bangladesh.” Agricultural and Resource Economics Review 47(1): 66-89.
Donato, D. C., J. B. Kauffman, D. Murdiyarso, S. Kurnianto, M. Stidham and M. Kanninen. 2011. “Mangroves among the most carbon-rich forests in the tropics.” Nature Geoscience 4(5): 293-97.
Duhautpas, F. and M. Solomos. 2014. “Hildegard Westerkamp and the Ecology of Sound as Experience. Notes on Beneath the Forest Floor.” Soundscape, The Journal of Acoustic Ecology 13(1). hal-01202890
Folke, C. (2016). “Resilience” (republished). Ecology and Society 21(4).
Gabrys, J. and K. Yusoff. 2012. “Arts, Sciences and Climate Change: Practices and Politics at the Threshold.” Science as Culture 21(1): 1-24.
Giri, C. et al. 2015. “Distribution and dynamics of mangrove forests of South Asia.” Journal of Environmental Management 148: 101-11.
Haraway, D. J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hassan, K., J. Higham, B. Wooliscroft and D. Hopkins. 2019. “Climate change and world heritage: a cross-border analysis of the Sundarbans (Bangladesh–India).” Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events 11(2): 196-219.
Hogarth, P. J. 2015. The Biology of Mangroves and Seagrasses. London: Oxford University Press.
Islam, R., and G. Walkerden. 2014. “How bonding and bridging networks contribute to disaster resilience and recovery on the Bangladeshi coast.” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 10(PA): 281-91.
Karmakar, S. 2022. “Climate Change and Everyday-Life: Negotiation of Women in the Sundarbans, India.” Man, Environment and Society 3(1): 49-64.
LaBelle, B. 2020. Sonic Agency: Sound and emergent forms of resistance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Langsdorf, S. et al. n.d. “Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
Lee, K. 2021. “Urban Public Space as a Didactic Platform: Raising Awareness of Climate Change through Experiencing Arts.” Sustainability 13(5): 2915.
McInnes, K., et al. n.d. “Perspective on regional sea-level change and coastal impacts.” Cambridge.Org. Retrieved August 26, 2025.
Mukhopadhyay, A. 2016. Living with disasters. Communities and development in the Indian Sundarbans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Donnell, A. and Q. Wodon. 2015. Climate Change Adaptation and Social Resilience in the Sundarbans. London: Routledge
Ortolano, L., E. Sánchez-Triana and S. A. Ferdausi. 2017. “Strategy for adapting to climate change and conserving biodiversity in the Bangladesh Sundarbans.” Climate and Development 9(4): 325-36.
Paul, B. G. and C. R. Vogl. 2011. “Impacts of shrimp farming in Bangladesh: Challenges and alternatives.” Ocean and Coastal Management 54(3): 201-11.
Payo, A., et al. 2016. “Projected changes in area of the Sundarban mangrove forest in Bangladesh due to SLR by 2100.” Climatic Change 139(2): 279-91.
Roy, S. 2019. “Sundarbans Forest and the Gendered Context of Cyclones: Sidr and Aila.” In S. Roy, Climate Change Impacts on Gender Relations in Bangladesh. Socio-environmental Struggle of the Shora Forest Community in the Sundarbans Mangrove Forest, 1-22.
Sanchez-Triana, E., T. Paul, L. Ortolano and J. Ruitenebeek (eds.). 2014. Building resilience for sustainable development of the Sundarbans. The World Bank Strategy Report No. 88061-IN.
Schlosberg, D. 2013. “Theorising environmental justice: The expanding sphere of a discourse.” Environmental Politics 22(1): 37-55.
Sengupta, S. 2023. “Addressing Climate Crisis Through Coastal Risk Management: The Social Protection Alternative.” In Climate Crisis: Adaptive Approaches and Sustainability, edited by U. Chatterjee et al., 105-20. New York: Springer.