As monsoon rains and upstream flows expose the vulnerability of Bangladesh’s flood-prone northeast, the consequences are being measured not only in damaged crops and submerged homes, but in the pressure placed on fragile livelihoods.
For communities living around the haors, vast seasonal wetlands that transform between agricultural land and open water, flooding can create a difficult social dilemma. Farmers risk losing crops and land, while fishers depend on the same flooded landscape for their catch. When water redraws the physical and economic boundaries of a community, questions over shelter, fishing access and scarce resources can quickly turn into conflict.
In parts of Sunamganj, young people are trying to prevent that. A network of local youth volunteers has set up informal resource-sharing peace committees, bringing together farming and fishing households to coordinate access to safe shelter, food, water and fishing areas. Rather than letting an emergency deepen existing divisions, resources are treated as something to be negotiated and shared.
The initiative comes amid another difficult monsoon. A Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief situation report of 12 July 2026 recorded 1,022,963 people affected and 267,918 families stranded by floodwaters across 58 upazilas in seven districts (Dhaka Tribune, 2026). That episode was concentrated largely in southeastern and northeastern districts, but it showed how quickly extreme rainfall can overwhelm communities and cut off essential services.
For the haor communities of Sunamganj, though, flooding isn’t exceptional, it’s part of the landscape.
When Water Changes the Rules
The haor region sits in the upper Meghna basin, where agriculture and fisheries are the principal economic activities; boro rice alone accounts for a significant share of national food production (BWDB, 2026).
The same land can serve radically different purposes across the year. In the dry season, areas that appear as open water during monsoon become agricultural fields; During the rains, those fields can vanish beneath several metres of water and become fishing grounds. That seasonal overlap creates difficult questions about who has the right to use flooded areas.
Research on Bangladesh’s wetlands has long documented this complexity. Haor fisheries operate through a mix of public, private and common-property systems, and the seasonal transformation of farmland into open water complicates ownership and access (IUCN Bangladesh, (2016). In Tanguar Haor, also in Sunamganj, disputes over wetland resources historically created tension between leaseholders and local communities, until co-management mechanisms showed that greater local participation could improve both resource management and livelihoods (Kabir & Amin, 2007).
The stakes are rising as environmental pressures accumulate. Recent research has found declining livelihood resilience among both farmers and fishers in the haor basin, linked to flooding, sedimentation, falling fish diversity and changes in agricultural productivity (Islam, Hossain & Hossain (2020).
Young People Step Into the Gap
Against this backdrop, the youth-led committees in Sunamganj represent a form of grassroots crisis management.
Twenty-two-year-old climate volunteer Fahmida Khan and more than 50 other local young volunteers are working across affected communities to identify households needing shelter and assistance.
“When everything is underwater, a dry patch of land or a clean freshwater source becomes something people are willing to fight over,” Khan told Peace News Network (PNN). “Traditional leadership often breaks down during a climate emergency because everyone is scrambling for their own survival.”
The committees focus on two immediate flashpoints: access to elevated shelter, and access to flooded fishing areas. For shelter, volunteers negotiate with owners of concrete houses, multi-storey buildings, and religious structures to accommodate displaced families , farming and fishing households alike, rather than sorted by occupation or status.
For fishing, when agricultural fields are submerged they can briefly become accessible fishing grounds, but unrestricted fishing can damage land that remains economically valuable to farmers beneath the water. The youth committees respond by negotiating rotational access, letting fishers work while trying to prevent damage to privately cultivated plots.
This reflects a broader lesson from Bangladesh’s disaster research: local volunteers can be crucial because they understand a community’s social geography. A 2021 study found that volunteer networks can complement formal flood-warning systems by reaching people top-down communication misses, functioning as a form of social capital in community-based disaster management (Al-Mueed et al., 2021). The Bangladesh Red Crescent Society’s youth volunteers have long played a similar role in emergency operations during floods and cyclones (BDRCS, 2026), and after the 2025 eastern floods, youth volunteers supported food distribution, medical assistance, shelter repairs and rescue work (PRAAN, 2025).
From Relief to Peacebuilding
What distinguishes the Sunamganj initiative is its emphasis on resource negotiation rather than simple distribution , and that distinction matters. Emergency relief typically focuses on delivering food, medicine, water and shelter. But disasters also alter relationships between people who depend on the same natural resources: a fisherman may see a flooded rice field as a chance for survival, while a farmer sees his future income disappearing beneath the same water.
Climate adaptation, in other words, isn’t just embankments, shelters and early-warning systems , it’s also negotiating competing claims over land, water and livelihoods. Studies of Bangladesh’s floodplains suggest cooperation is possible when resource users participate in management decisions, though conflicts persist where access and property rights remain contested. Tanguar Haor’s experience with co-management offers one example: researchers documented improved fish catches and the return of several species once local communities gained a stronger collective voice (Mondal et al., 2010).
A Model With Limits
The youth committees can’t replace the state, and informal agreements can’t resolve the structural causes of haor vulnerability , declining fish stocks, crop losses, and drainage systems under strain remain ongoing constraints on livelihoods in Sunamganj (The Business Standard, 2021; UNB, 2026). Upstream rainfall, siltation, weak infrastructure and disrupted natural water flows continue to drive recurring vulnerability across the region.
For young volunteers, peacebuilding begins where formal systems struggle to reach. Their work doesn’t stop the flood, restore a damaged crop, or replenish fish stocks. What it can do is prevent a disaster from becoming a social conflict.
That may be the most important lesson from the submerged haors this monsoon: climate resilience isn’t only about surviving water. It’s also about deciding, collectively, how to live with it. Bangladesh will need stronger infrastructure, better forecasting and sustained investment in vulnerable communities, but it may also need to recognise a resource already present in many flood-prone villages: young people willing to organise, negotiate and build trust when conventional systems are under pressure.
Keywords: Bangladesh, floods, youth, environmental, climate change, resource sharing, floodwaters, Haor, peace, conflict, conflict resolution
Sheikh Mehzabin Chitra is an anthropologist, human rights advocate, and researcher focused on marginalized communities, displacement, and grassroots peacebuilding. Her work combines ethnographic research with journalism and policy analysis to amplify voices from the margins and examine how everyday practices sustain peace in humanitarian settings.
