Covering approximately 10,000 km² the Sundarbans in the Northern Bay of Bengal is the largest contiguous mangrove forest on earth. Mangroves forests are highly productive and diverse ecosystems, providing a wide range of direct ecosystem services for resident populations. In addition, mangroves function as a buffer against frequently occurring cyclones; helping to protect local settlements including the two most populous cities of the world, Kolkata and Dhaka, against their worst effects. While large tracts of the Indian Sundarbans were cleared, drained and reclaimed for cultivation during the British colonial era, the remaining parts have been under various protection regimes since the 1970s, primarily to protect the remaining population of Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris ssp. tigris). In view of the importance of such forests, now severely threatened worldwide, we trace the areal change that the Indian Sundarbans have undergone over the last two-and-a-half centuries. We apply a multi-temporal and multi-scale approach based on historical maps and remote sensing data to detect changes in mangrove cover. While the mangroves’ areal extent has not changed much in the recent past, forest health and structure have. These changes result from direct human interference, upstream development, extreme weather events and the slow onset of climate change effects. Moreover, we consider the role of different management strategies affecting mangrove conservation and their intersection with local livelihoods.

Climate change is a ‘wicked’ problem. No central authority manages climate change, and those creating the problem are also trying to solve it. Climate change brings uncertainty in ways that cities have not tackled previously. There is a need to explore new governance forms able to deal with change and to enable transformations. In this paper we explore seven local climate innovations to better understand the enabling conditions underpinning success and the governance barriers that are encountered. We connect the more formal and emergent climate governance ‘innovations' through adaptation and mitigation experiments in Mumbai, India. Case studies indicate an emerging development model. Effective climate governance has to be an inevitable part of new development in the South. While climate externality exists in all development planning and implementation, smaller community-level efforts indicate how opportunities are offered within existing systems to integrate with larger institutional climate governance.

Intersectional impacts of climatic changes are producing unforeseen physical and mental health challenges such as acute depression, stress, severe malnutrition, cervical cancer, sexually transmitted diseases for the poor and marginalized women and children. Conducted in the Indian Sundarbans, a social-ecological system critically stressed by climate change, this study disentangles, uncovers, and highlights obscured ways in which sudden and slow-onset eco-climatic shifts induced by climatic changes interact with existing patterns of social-ecological (mis)governance, gender inequity, power structures and struggles, therein, patriarchal policies and neoliberal markets. Coping mechanisms of the communities are shaped by complex, multi-layered, and scalar processes that involve institutional failures, private markets, and neoliberal governance patterns, which in turn are resulting in severely negative health consequences for women and children. Employing a justice lens and an agent-based coproduction of knowledge helps to move beyond the obscured causalities for specific health threats to foster an agenda for action. At the local scale, this framework identifies diverse and novel ways in which development policies and governance across domains must synergize to enhance specific capacities of women and children, allowing them to make right adaptation choices that bolster their long-term resilience. Theoretically, it uncovers how the global resilience agenda is increasingly being dominated by disaster capitalism that is producing negative health consequences at the local levels. Private capital, in conjunction with or through alliances with the state, identify weaknesses of resilience governance as profiteering opportunities and promote “adaptation” products and services through a hegemonic process. Despite producing maladaptation in the Sundarbans, the hegemony ensures that the pattern is reinstated and reproduced consensually. This pushed the responsibility of maladaptation into individual domains. Repoliticizing and affirmatively sabotaging this resilience design seems essential, which future studies should aim for.