In May 2026 the writers of a recent report spent time in the Sundarbans, expecting to look closely at a forest. What they came away with was closer to an account of households, and of the decisions families take under pressure. They argue, too, that the delta is not the only place where such decisions are now being forced.

The delta is more usually discussed in ecological terms. It is the biggest mangrove forest on earth; UNESCO lists it as a World Heritage Site; and young animals of both water and land grow up there. The writers do not dispute that description. Their objection is that it leaves part of the picture out.

What they recorded alongside it was a slower physical breakdown. Embankments — the earth walls built to hold the tidal rivers off the fields — are giving way faster than the communities behind them can mend them. The mending, too, is improvised more and more often: mud and bamboo pushed into the gaps ahead of the monsoon, rather than any solid rebuilding. Salt water is working its way into ground where rice used to grow, so that land which once produced two crops a year now manages barely one. Ponds that households kept for freshwater fish farming are turning brackish, partly salty rather than fresh, and that is not a change they come back from.

Fish able to live in water like that are smaller and fetch less, and they are not the catch that pays a child's school fees or a family's everyday bills. Everyone the writers interviewed had noticed the drop in what a day's fishing is worth. The responses they describe are undramatic and practical: people set up co-operatives, take paid labouring work, or send a son or daughter to a city the family had never planned to live in. This, the writers argue, is what adaptation becomes once it stops being a matter of policy and turns into something a household settles under pressure.