The first thing that struck us wasn’t the missing trees, but the missing water. In May 2026, we visited the Sundarbans, a mangrove forest in the delta where the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers meet in the Bay of Bengal.

We went there expecting a story about the mangroves, the tangled, salt-tolerant forests that are supposed to be the last line of defence against cyclones and rising seas. What we found instead was a dry pond, cracked and empty, in a delta where water was never supposed to run out.

A few months earlier it had held fish that fed families. Now it held nothing, and the family that once worked it had joined a self-help group, pooling savings from neighbours to try to make ends meet. That pond has stayed with us longer than any statistic about mangrove loss. It’s a small, specific failure, but one that’s occurring across an ecosystem where four million people depend on for food, income and shelter.

The Sundarbans is often discussed as an ecological story: it is the world’s largest mangrove forest, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a nursery for water and land creatures.

That framing isn’t wrong, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Embankments built to hold back tidal rivers are failing........

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