Coastal Community Perspectives in Disaster Risk Reduction Practices: Field Narratives from the Coastal Sundarbans

This collection of field narratives from the Indian Sundarbans examines how communities live and adapt within one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable landscapes. Rising seas, recurrent cyclones, and saline intrusions continuously reshape livelihoods, yet resilience emerges through practices deeply rooted in everyday life. Voices from the Coast explores household strategies of rebuilding, shifting cultivation, and collective solidarity in response to environmental pressures. Cyclone Chronicles captures experiences of loss and recovery, demonstrating how social cooperation and improvisation allow communities to endure successive storms. Beyond the River Banks highlights forms of hope, emphasising the significance of self-help groups, women-led initiatives, and intergenerational learning in sustaining households across flood-prone areas. Rising Sea, Rising Resilience introduces participatory mapping as both a planning tool and a political act that connects local memory with scientific evidence, making sea-level rise tangible while expanding the space for community agency in adaptation debates. Journeys of Resilience situates migration as both a livelihood strategy and a social transformation, where remittances sustain fragile households while displacement reshapes gender relations and community cohesion. The narratives collectively argue that resilience in the Sundarbans extends beyond infrastructure or policy frameworks. It is a dynamic process shaped through memory, agency, and imagination, where adaptation is understood not as a singular solution but as a continuum of strategies including staying, leaving, rebuilding, and reimagining. The Sundarbans thus provides vital insights for global discussions on climate resilience and sustainable adaptation.