As the last bricks of Odisha’s centuries-old Panchubarahi Temple vanish into the Bay of Bengal, an entire sacred geography and Dalit women–led religious tradition is transformed from what it used to be.
The relocation of villagers to Bagapatia and construction of a new temple cannot replace the ancestral seascape, mangroves and cultural memory, exposing how climate change destroys identity beyond measurable economic loss.
On August 31, 2026, people from erstwhile Satabhaya, now settled about 12 kilometres away at Bagapatia in Odisha’s Kendrapada district, sent me a video and photographs of the last remains of the Panchubarahi Temple disappearing beneath the Bay of Bengal’s hungry tides. I watched the images with a strange sense of helplessness.
The last bricks of the temple were going down. But what disappeared beneath those waves was much more than a physical structure.
For the people of Satabhaya, a cluster of seven villages, Panchubarahi was a pillar of ancestral identity. It stood at the intersection of faith, geography, livelihood, memory, community and the sea. And now, even that last physical connection with their ancestral landscape has gone.
Satabhaya has been disappearing for decades. Village after village has been swallowed by coastal erosion. Hundreds of families were eventually relocated to Bagapatia. The five deities of Panchubarahi were moved there in 2018, and a new, larger temple was constructed in the relocation colony.
But as many elders and young people have told me, it is not the same. And this is precisely where the language of climate policy falls painfully short.
Panchubarahi was not simply another coastal temple.
For around 400 years, the temple had been served by married Dalit women from the local fishing community as priestesses. Men were traditionally forbidden from touching the deities. This was an extraordinary social and cultural institution—particularly in a society where Dalit women have historically faced exclusion from religious spaces. The priestesses were not merely performing rituals; they were custodians of an intergenerational relationship between their community, their deities and their landscape.
When the five heavy black-stone deities had to be moved from the old temple because the advancing sea threatened to swallow it, the old tradition itself had to be temporarily broken. For the first time in centuries, men entered the sanctum to help carry the approximately 1.5-tonne idols to safety. The priestesses subsequently performed purification rituals.
There is something profoundly symbolic about that moment. The sea did not merely force a temple to move. It forced a centuries-old cultural practice to bend. And that is the kind of loss that rarely appears in a disaster assessment.
I have previously written about young people from Bagapatia telling me something that has stayed with me: “Our originality is gone; we live with a duplicate identity.”
Their words explain something that statistics cannot.
The new Panchubarahi temple allows the rituals to continue. The deities remain. The priestesses continue their traditions. But the geography that gave those traditions their deeper meaning is disappearing.
The old temple was inseparable from the seascape. It belonged to the villages that are now under the sea. It was associated with the lives of sailors and fisherfolk who sought the blessings of the deities before going out to sea and after returning. Panchubarahi literally means “five wild boars”, reflected in the five carved faces of the deities. The deities were also traditionally connected to the surrounding mangrove ecosystem.
When the people moved, their relationship with the mangroves and their traditional access to that landscape also changed. That is a double loss: loss of place and loss of relationship with place.
And for young people, it can become a loss of the thread connecting them to their ancestors.
Climate policy is reasonably good at counting what can be counted: houses destroyed, hectares of farmland lost, boats damaged, roads washed away and money required for reconstruction.
But how do we count the loss of an ancestral landscape? How do we calculate the value of a temple whose significance comes not from its bricks but from its relationship with a particular sea, mangrove, village and community?
How do we compensate a young person for losing the cultural geography through which she or he understood belonging?
This is where Non-Economic Loss and Damage (NELD), or what I would term ‘invisible/uncountable loss and damage’ becomes so important.
The climate discourse increasingly recognises losses involving cultural heritage, identity, territory, habitability, traditional knowledge, social cohesion and relationships with ecosystems. But even the term “non-economic” perhaps understates the magnitude of what is happening. For a community, these losses may represent the loss of its entire world.
Panchubarahi is therefore not simply a temple lost to coastal erosion. It is a piece of cultural memory lost. It is a social institution disrupted. It is a sacred geography erased. It is an ecological relationship weakened. And it is an intergenerational connection placed at risk.
Across the world, communities facing climate displacement are confronting similar invisible losses.
In Bangladesh, sea-level rise, salinity and erosion can produce not only landlessness and livelihood insecurity but also psychological distress and erosion of identity and belonging. In Pacific Island communities, the loss of land can mean the loss of vanua—a deeply interconnected understanding of land, culture and identity.
In coastal Odisha itself, displaced communities have spoken about the loss of ancestral sites, burial and cremation grounds, traditional livelihoods and ecological knowledge. Young people increasingly face a difficult choice between staying in shrinking geographies with diminishing livelihoods and migrating elsewhere in search of survival.
For many, this is not migration driven by aspiration. It is migration driven by compulsion.
And when young people leave, the loss can continue: traditional knowledge weakens, community bonds fracture, cultural practices become harder to sustain and the relationship between people and ecosystems becomes increasingly distant.
This is why adaptation cannot end with relocation, compensation and reconstruction.
Of course, people need safe houses, roads, schools, drinking water and secure livelihoods. Physical safety is non-negotiable. But a bigger concrete temple cannot automatically replace a sacred landscape.
A new settlement cannot automatically recreate the relationship between a community and its ecosystem. And relocation cannot be considered complete simply because people have been moved from an unsafe place to a safer one.
We need to document cultural landscapes, oral histories, sacred sites, traditional ecological knowledge and community relationships with nature before they disappear. Relocation planning must consider cultural continuity, social cohesion, livelihoods, mental wellbeing and the rights and aspirations of young people.
The story of Panchubarahi also reminds us that climate justice must recognise intersectionality. The loss here is environmental or cultural. It touches gender, caste, livelihood, community identity and the particular role of Dalit fisherwomen who carried a centuries-old religious tradition.
When climate change forces a community to move, whose culture is being protected? Whose traditions are being documented? Whose voices are heard in deciding what must be carried forward?
Because climate change does not only destroy what people own. It can destroy what people are.
The last brick of Panchubarahi has now gone beneath the sea. Perhaps we should ask ourselves what else went down with it—memories, stories, identities, ecological knowledge, women’s traditional roles, belonging and an entire way of relating to nature.
And when we relocate people but lose their relationship with place, have we really relocated a community—or merely moved its people?
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth