From the Brahmaputra to the Rhine: Tracing the Currents of Climate Mobility

In this blog, Ranon Jahan, a researcher at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD, Dhaka, Bangladesh) brings together his thoughts following the Environmental and Climate Mobility Network conference held in Bonn, Germany, in July of this year. Through the comparative case studies of two rivers, he considers the interlocking issues of risk, climate mobility, and disaster governance.

“Millions of them must move”: a warning first voiced by William Vogt in 1948. Seventy-six years later, we are still counting millions of displaced people each year, with the numbers only growing. On 10th July 2025, as a young researcher from Bangladesh, I shared how it occurs in my home country at the Environmental and Climate Mobility Network (ECMN 25) Conference held in Bonn, Germany. The conference draws collective understanding on climate mobility which brought together 180 participants from across the world includes 128 presentations and 6 workshops. The whole conference was the platform for the researchers, practitioners and policy makers to share their findings, methods and recommendation. It explores both challenges and possibilities of governing climate mobility. These diverse perspectives reshaped how I see my work in global platform. This blog is my reflection on those connection where global narratives align with local realities, where they miss and why accountability in climate mobility governance matters now more than ever.

Two Rivers, One Story

I began my Bonn journey standing by the Rhine River, thousands of miles away from the Brahmaputra’s eroding banks in Bangladesh. The Brahmaputra is one of the largest rivers in the world, known for its powerful current and seasonal flood in Bangladesh. During monsoon, it becomes furious, with a shifting course. It can swallow homes, schools, agricultural land and entire villages, leaving families nowhere to go. When I was standing by the Rhine and looking into the its flowing water, I felt the same pulse of uncertainty that my fieldwork has shown me back home. Back by the Brahmaputra, my conversations with local communities were filled with stories of distress and uncertainty. Standing by the Rhine during the conference, listening to others speak of their own hardships and governance challenges, I realized those conversations were not so different after all. Presenting my findings there was more than a research, it was a way of placing a local story in a global current.

The conference quickly revealed that the issues I work on are not limited to one region. Listening to different research from around the world, I realized that the struggles of climate mobility transcend borders. In the same panel where one researcher presented statistics on Assam, India, estimating the staggering yearly costs of disasters, another shared how a single flood in Germany caused damages far exceeding those figures, despite advanced structural measures. The scale may differ, but the vulnerabilities and governance challenges are interconnected.

Photo Credit: Rawnak Jahan Khan Ranon

Beyond Climate: The Messy Web of Governance

Over three days, it became clear to me that climate mobility is not shaped by climate change alone. Geopolitics, global conflicts, and migration governance are constantly reshaping displacement narratives and dynamics. Much of the discussion revolved around finding better governance systems for this deeply complex issue. Yet, we also confronted a harder question: as researchers, are we clarifying or complicating the concept by layering on new terminologies?

The conference was a meeting ground of questions and stories of thriving, struggling, and striving migrants from across the globe, including my own presentation on displacement risk along the Brahmaputra. But when the conversation shifted from problems to solutions, the overwhelming complexity of governance took center stage. Speeches and presentations often concluded that governance needs to be both localized and global. Yet, the connection between the two is far more tangled than it sounds, echoing what some scholars describe through the lens of glocalisation—the uneven and sometimes contradictory ways global agendas are interpreted and reworked in local contexts.

My own presentation centered on multi-actor responsibility, leadership, and power-sharing as a way to reduce vulnerability to displacement at sub-national level. Yet, in reality, both Bangladesh and elsewhere, the governance remains limited, underperforming and far from adequately accountable. But after three days of attending different sessions, the questions left unclear to me is “who is accountable, how and to what extent?” In practice, accountability often moves through layers, what governments promise on paper, how institutions interpret it, and what actually reaches people on the ground. Yet true accountability should not end with legal or policy frameworks; it must be felt in practice through transparent decisions, meaningful participation, and clear limit on what those in power. And yet, I remain unclear about how this should ultimately be realized.

Photo Credit: Douwe van Schie

From Local Currents to Global Tides

One reality struck me that policy processes, reviews, advocacy, and negotiations move far slower than the pace of displacement. By the time governance systems are being negotiated, the communities we talk about have already been uprooted. Amidst all of these thoughts, my time in Bonn was overwhelming and filled with concerns and contested ideas around climate mobility. By the end, I couldn’t point to a single, immediate global action that would secure the rights and quality of life for millions at risk.

Yet, the conference was an eye-opener, giving me a macro lens to view my work. My story from the Brahmaputra may seem small in the grand scale of global climate mobility, but it resonated alongside every other study shared in those rooms. Each case added a knot to the tangled net of mobility challenges, showing the urgent need to both untangle these knots and zooming into those knots closely.

It left me with a powerful reminder that  local stories are never just local, they are threads in the global fabric of climate mobility, and understanding them is key to creating governance that is both just and effective.

Acknowledgement

The author’s participation in the conference was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 884139).

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Rawnak Jahan Khan Ranon is a Research Officer at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD). With a degree in Forestry, he has developed his expertise at the intersection of natural resource management and social research on climate change. His work focuses on forest management, displacement, locally led adaptation, and accountability. He continues to study how governance and adaptation affect the lives of vulnerable communities in Bangladesh.