Bound by disaster

On December 26, 2004, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean tore through the coastlines, claiming over 0.25 million lives. In Tamil Nadu’s Cuddalore district, most of the people who died were women. In the aftermath, families, desperate to shield their adolescent daughters from uncertainty, hur¬ried them into marriages—often with men twice their age.

Two decades later, in drought-stricken Marathwada region of Maharashtra, catastrophe moves differently. This May, temperatures crossed 44°C, wells dried up and fodder vanished. In districts like Beed and Osmanabad, families again turned to early marriage for their daughters—not as tradition, but as a survival tactic. Communities hastily arranged “gate-cane” weddings—alliances fixed and solemnised within hours or a couple of days—ahead of the sugarcane harvest, when labour contractors would be scouting for couples. Young brides may soon have been seen in sugarcane farms, sickle in hand.

One disaster struck overnight. The other has been simmering for years. But in both cases, adolescent girls were forced into marriage under the weight of crisis.

This pattern is seen across South Asia, which is not only among the most climate-vulnerable regions but also records the world’s highest rates of child marriage. According to the World Bank, more than 750 million people in South Asia—over half the region’s population—have been affected by climate-related disasters over the past two decades. For the families that are already struggling to survive, these shocks are accelerating child marriage in quiet but devastating ways. “Child marriage is seen as a moral issue, but are we asking why communities are making these decisions?” says Maryam Jamali, a community worker with Balochistan-based non-profit Madat Balochistan. “Families know it is not ideal, but they see no other option. It is a form of risk management.”

Climate change does not directly cause child marriage. But it magnifies the pressures—poverty, displacement, food insecurity—that make it more likely. Across rural India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, when schools shut after di-sasters, land dries up or social protection falters, girls are the first to be pulled from school, and married.

Take Bangladesh, whose flood-prone, low-lying geography leaves it acutely vulnerable to rising seas and displacement. A 2022 report by Plan International, an organisation that works for children’s rights and welfare, says nearly two-thirds of girls in Bangladesh marry before the age of 18. Another 2022 study by humanitarian non-profit International Rescue Committee reports a 39 per cent rise in child marriages in climate-affected regions, driven by displacement, food insecurity and school closures.

This pattern played out after the 2022 floods in Pakistan, which displaced over 33 million people. In Sindh, 45 underage marriages were recorded in one village within months, says a September 2024 article in the French daily Le Monde, citing data from a non-profit, Sujag Sansar. Many of the alliances were hurried ahead of the next monsoon cycle. Similar reports emerged after the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, and even during the Ebola crisis in West Africa.

It would be misleading to suggest a simple cause-effect relationship between climate change and early marriage. The links are neither automatic nor uniform. In dowry-dependent communities, economic shocks sometimes delay marriage. In others, displacement, hunger or labour demands hasten weddings. The reality is shaped by a tangle of poverty, gender inequality, local economies and institutional neglect. This is why a socio-ecological lens, which considers how environmental shocks interact with entrenched vulnerabilities, is key.

A 2015 report by international non-profit Human Rights Watch notes parents often see early marriage less as custom, more as a desperate response to crisis. But long-term costs are staggering. Girls who marry early are likelier to drop out of school, face early pregnancies, suffer domestic violence and remain locked in poverty. Disasters also deepen gender divides. Women and girls are likelier to go hungry during food shortages and shoulder care burdens after calamities. “It is not just about marrying early—it is about the erosion of all choices,” says Upasona Ghosh, senior social anthropologist, Indian Institute of Public Health, Bhubaneswar.

But national climate adaptation strategies in South Asia largely ignore these dynamics. Infrastructure dominates spending. Resilience is measured in embankments and megawatts—not in whether girls return to school, access protec-tion or regain their agency.

The gaps extend to data. Most child marriages happen in displaced communities, informal settlements or disaster zones, unregistered. Without better systems, governments underestimate the scale and urgency of the problem.

Over the years, governments and non-profits have tried interventions like cash incentives for school attendance, mobile education units, legal aid and community protection systems. In Rajasthan’s Karauli district, for instance, adolescent girls formed the Dalit Adivasi Pichhada Varg Kishori Shiksha Abhiyan post-pandemic, mobilising over 1,200 girls to push back against a rising trend of child marriages. Such grassroots efforts show what is possible when communities are treated as agents of change. But these initiatives remain chronically underfunded and overlooked in mainstream adaptation agendas. They also risk falling short unless they account for the climate realities that shape family decisions and are centred around the girls’ interests.

What happens in South Asia, where the climate, economic and social crises collide, will shape global understanding of gendered impacts of climate change. If we keep treating child marriage as a symptom, and not a systemic signal of risk and neglect, adaptation plans will fail before they begin. What is needed is not another round of reactive protection, but a shift in how resilience is conceived and funded. Adaptation plans must address how disasters disrupt education, livelihoods and safety for girls, and direct resources toward community-led efforts, school retention programmes and systems that tackle root causes.

(Reetika Revathy Subramanian is senior research associate at the School of Global Development, University of East Anglia, UK. She runs Climate Brides, a multimedia project that examines how climate change deepens drivers of child marriage across South Asia)

This article was originally published in the August 1-15, 2025 print edition of Down To Earth