Climate Injustice and Commodification of Lives and Livelihoods in Southwest Coastal Bangladesh

Keywords: Climate Injustice, Commodification, Disaster Capitalism, Southwest coastal, Bangladesh.
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Disasters are sites where people who are marginalized in society, especially poor people of color, may be secured, controlled, displaced, and capitalized on. This paper focuses on capitalist expansion and its implications for climate justice in environmentally and economically vulnerable places like Southwest coastal Bangladesh. Commodification, in the context of this paper, is the process of monetizing nature and livelihoods for the purpose of surplus accumulation and profit maximization. The study location is two rural units of southwest coastal Bangladesh known as Kamarkhola and Sutarkhali which are extreme disaster-prone areas. The methodology is qualitative in nature and will primarily rely on a discourse analysis of livelihood history interviews and semi-structured interview transcripts with the affected people of the studied area and local administrative officers. Based on empirical evidence from the study area, this paper will show the expansion of capitalist production in environmentally vulnerable places due to climate injustice and disaster capitalism through the production of nature and the process of dispossession. It will also conceptually reveal the interconnectedness of global climate change, climate injustice, broader political and economic structure, local socioeconomic and power structure, and disaster capitalism for establishing the ground of climate justice in southwest coastal Bangladesh.