MARRIAGE OF SURVIVAL

A Region on the Edge

South Asia has the highest rate of early and forced marriages in the world, with nearly one in five girls married before they turn 15. At the same time, it ranks among the most climate-vulnerable regions globally. In just two decades, over 750 million people — half the region’s population — have been affected by climate-related disasters. From Bangladesh’s cyclones to India’s scorching heatwaves, Sri Lanka’s tsunami to Pakistan’s devastating floods, extreme weather has both exposed and deepened long-standing inequalities tied to gender, caste, and poverty.

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When Climate Crisis Meets Gender Inequality

For families already at the margins, environmental shocks demand impossible choices. As droughts dry up water sources and floods destroy crops, the daily struggle for food, water, and fuel intensifies. In this burdened landscape, girls are often the first to be pulled from school, pushed into informal labour, or exposed to heightened risks of exploitation and violence. Disasters only amplify these pressures — and the poorest communities often face the greatest barriers to receiving relief.

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Marriage as Strategy, Not Just Tradition

In such circumstances, child marriage may appear to offer a form of security — not as a cultural relic, but as a coping mechanism. Some families marry off daughters as a way to reduce household expenses or form ties with more stable families. In others, marriage becomes a mobility strategy — a route to climate-resilient areas or safer livelihoods. What looks like custom is often calculation, shaped by constrained choices.

But these decisions come at a price. Girls married early face greater risk of abuse, isolation, and lifelong poverty. What is framed as protection can, in reality, cement inequality across generations.

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Beyond Cause and Effect

The link between climate change and child marriage is not linear — and it is dangerously oversimplified. While evidence suggests that environmental shocks intensify marriage pressures, few studies capture the full complexity. Large national surveys miss displaced and mobile populations. Localised studies reveal texture but lack scale. Causal narratives dominate policy discussions, but they flatten the layered realities of gendered adaptation under stress.

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What Climate Brides Brings

Launched in 2021, Climate Brides is an open-source multimedia platform that examines how climate change is reshaping survival, mobility, and marriage across South Asia. Grounded in regional research, the project features stories, interviews, maps, and thematic podcasts. From sugarcane fields in Maharashtra to floodplains in Bangladesh and displacement camps in Afghanistan, we centre the lived experiences of adolescent girls and their communities — not as passive victims, but as actors navigating difficult terrain.

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Why This Work Matters

At Climate Brides, we do not seek causal closure. We ask deeper, more difficult questions: How do climate shocks intersect with patriarchy, poverty, migration, and weak institutions? What does adaptation look like when the state is absent? And what are the costs when girls are forced to carry the burden of survival?

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For Those Who Need to Know

This platform is for researchers, journalists, practitioners, educators, and community organisers working at the intersection of gender, development, and climate. It is for those who refuse simple answers — and who believe that climate justice must begin with those most at risk, and too often ignored.