SUNDERBANS, West Bengal—Thirty-year-old Sita*, originally from a coastal region of Bangladesh, recalls the day Cyclone Aila struck with chilling clarity. Her house made from mud and thatch crumbled from the impact.

“It began like any other day, until a sudden shift in the air warned us of an impending disaster,” she said.

SUNDERBANS, West Bengal—Thirty-year-old Sita*, originally from a coastal region of Bangladesh, recalls the day Cyclone Aila struck with chilling clarity. Her house made from mud and thatch crumbled from the impact.

“It began like any other day, until a sudden shift in the air warned us of an impending disaster,” she said.

“We heard people screaming that the riverbank had broken, and the water was rapidly heading toward the village,” she recalled while sitting on the floor outside her brick-and-mortar house in the Sunderbans area of West Bengal, where she now lives. When she went back a few days later, everything had been washed away. Nothing was left of what was once her home.

“We lost everything—our home, our possessions, everything,” she recalled, her voice heavy with memory.

According to the Global Climate Risk Index 2021, Bangladesh ranks seventh in countries most affected by climate change since 2000. The World Health Organization reports that in 2022 alone, more than 7.1 million Bangladeshis were displaced as a result of it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that sea level rise will inundate soil with salt, reduce crop productivity, and increase poverty by 15 percent by 2030.

The issue of migration and the impacts of climate change, however, are not confined to Bangladesh alone. The Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, shared by India and Bangladesh, lies at the heart of this mobility.

While most climate-related displacement is internal, many Bangladeshis migrate to India through porous borders. Informational circulars in the Indian Border Security Force camps on one such border in Panitar highlighted these infiltrations as a recurring issue.

The illegal nature of such movement makes it difficult to determine the exact number of Bangladeshi migrants in India. However, the Asian Development Bank states that this could be the largest international migration flow, surpassing migration across the Mexico-U.S. border.

“Migration is very frequent between Bangladesh and India, particularly from the Sundarbans area. People have friends, neighbors, and relatives there, so they cross the border—sometimes legally, sometimes illegally,” explained Md Shamsuddoha, the chief executive of the Center for Participatory Research and Development, a policy think tank in Bangladesh.

“As you call them refugees, they are not refugees that are stateless and persecuted by the government, like the Rohingyas. However, in Bangladesh, this is not the case because the government is not forcing them to leave the country. Those moving to India are crossing the border voluntarily.”

Ashok Swain, a professor and head of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University, Sweden, and the UNESCO chair of international water cooperation, highlighted the ambiguity of the term, calling it the absence of a legal framework—both domestically and internationally—that fails to recognize climate migrants as refugees. This allows both........

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