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Bangladesh is customarily presented as a poster child for climate change and conflict given its dense population and susceptibility to climate variability. This vulnerability exacerbates existing challenges such as food insecurity and conflict potential. Crises like pandemics and conflicts are external drivers stressing already compromised domestic governance, such as violent politics, poor rule of law, and corruption, further compounding the challenges of land and water resource management and affecting food (in)security in Bangladesh. While we will argue that Bangladesh’s all-out (‘securitised’) efforts to achieve food security are largely successful and there is no evidence of climate conflict related to food, this does not obviate very real food security challenges in remote areas. However, these have not built up to the sense of frustration associated with food riots or community violence. Navigating the possible linkages between climate, food (in)security, and conflict requires debunking common myths and identifying unresolved research puzzles in Bangladesh’s context. These myths promote the oversimplification of complex issues and may lead to misinformed policies and actions. Future research needs to be focused on understanding how climate factors interact with local economic, political, and social dynamics, including governance mechanisms, religious and ethnic tensions, economic inequality, grievances, and political exclusion.

In this introductory paper we discuss the emergence of the ‘event’ as a critical point of interrogation of contemporary understandings of disaster. While the practicalities of DRR are underpinned by an applied vision of disaster studies largely built around hazards scholarship, developments within a number of theoretical perspectives increasingly doubt the ability of this objectivist and ‘experiential’ approach to reduce risk in the longer term. Here, we categorise these various challenges as revealed through the SI's cases and theoretical interventions, and in selected wider scholarship, and assess what they mean for disaster interpretation, prediction and politicisation. We frame the eight articles making up the SI within an overarching view of the event based around social interpretations of space, place, time, and nature. (Re)assessing calamitous events, we argue, is prescient in a contemporary global predicament focussed on present and future ‘climatic threats’.

Popular climate change narratives often identify climate change as the prime trigger of all environmental hazards. Consistent and harmonised framing of this relationship by public media, epistemic communities and established institutions continually shapes and reinforces such narratives. These dominant narratives may present an image of an apocalyptic future beyond the coping capacity of ‘climate victims’ (often identified – implicitly or explicitly – as the poor and those living in the majority work) while rendering climate change responsible for all disaster-related miseries. Such ‘doomsday’, ‘victimhood’, and ‘common villain’ strings of a convergent narrative use selective and occasional recourse to science to support a generic understanding of the challenge of climate change. Drawing on examples of recent environmental stresses in Bangladesh, we call for local accountability and highlight the ‘scale effect’ of politics of vulnerability framing.

The climatisation of security has given a new impulse to fears of violent environmental conflict over scarce resources such as water. The present contribution links water conflict narratives to climate as a driver of conflict and notions of scarcity. Each of these narratives tends to have rather linear assumptions proving a false sense of certainty This is worrying as the uptake of particular narratives has material consequences, directing material resources in particular, in potentially harmful or wasteful ways. It is argued we will have to accept that climate-fuelled water conflict is an unstructured problem we do not understand very well, and have to take systemic complexity and emergence far more seriously than we have done so far. This contribution first introduces the concept of (environmental policy) narratives, after which it expounds ‘water wars’ and two contending narratives: ‘water peace’ and ‘water justice’.