When the sky burns and the future fades

In the humid silence of a summer afternoon in Khulna, a teenage girl wipes sweat from her brow and looks out at a charred patch of land where mango trees once stood. Her grandfather tells her that this used to be a thriving orchard, but now the fruit withers before it ripens. In the flood-prone hamlets of Sunamganj, a university-bound boy tries to study for his exams on the bamboo platform of a submerged home, clutching his textbooks above water that has claimed the fields and the road. 

In the parched plains of Rajshahi, children fall sick from heatstroke before they turn ten. These are not merely instances of weather anomalies. These are visceral, lived experiences of a generation slowly being scorched by what Ashlee Cunsolo and Vanessa Andreotti define as climate grief and postcolonial melancholia. For the youth of Bangladesh, the climate crisis is not just a scientific debate or a policy challenge-it is a spiritual unraveling, an emotional inheritance of despair.

Cunsolo and Andreotti's scholarship urges us to reframe environmental collapse not solely as a material or ecological crisis, but as a deeply emotional and psychological one. Climate grief, in their terms, is not limited to mourning biodiversity loss or rising seas, but encapsulates the internal ruptures and disorientations of living in a world whose future is increasingly uncertain.

For Bangladeshi youth, this grief is compounded by the trauma of postcolonial melancholia-a psychic residue of colonial dispossession, disempowerment, and interrupted development. Young people in the country are caught in a paradox. On the one hand, they are hailed as the agents of a sustainable future, bearers of innovation and resilience. On the other hand, they are inheriting a world already on fire-literally and metaphorically. The IPCC reports, though distant in language, become personal when flash floods submerge classrooms or when news of displaced coastal families circulates across TikTok and Facebook. 

Every new cyclone, flood, and creeping salinisation of soil erodes not just land, but also hope. In urban and rural Bangladesh alike, young minds grapple with a sense of helplessness. Their dreams of education, careers, and stable families are haunted by the knowledge that the physical world needed to sustain those dreams may not exist in a few decades.

There is a psychological toll to this awareness. As psychologists and educators report, rising anxiety, insomnia, and a profound sense of dislocation are becoming common among students and adolescents. These are not just symptoms of stress; they are expressions of climate grief-of knowing too much, too soon, and feeling powerless in the face of such knowledge. While climate activism has taken root among many young Bangladeshis, not all can transform anxiety into advocacy. For many, the sheer scale of the crisis produces paralysis. 

The emotional burden is not evenly distributed either. Marginalised youth-those in char areas, coastal belts, slums, and refugee settlements-face compounded vulnerabilities. For them, climate grief is not abstract. It is embodied in daily hunger, forced migration, broken families, and lost education.

Postcolonial melancholia, as Andreotti frames it, is the affective condition of those living in the wake of colonial violence, caught between unfulfilled promises of modernity and the stark realities of ecological collapse. In Bangladesh, this melancholia manifests in the form of national aspirations-Digital Bangladesh, Vision 2041, Smart Cities- were running parallel to the undeniable deterioration of its natural systems. 

Youth are told to dream of Silicon Valley-style futures, even as their neighbourhoods are submerged, their rivers poisoned, and their air rendered unbreathable. This duality produces a cultural and emotional dissonance, where ambition and despair exist side by side. The result is a quiet, chronic grief that has no place in public discourse but thrives in personal journals, spoken word poetry, and late-night conversations among friends.

Popular culture in Bangladesh reflects this emotional turbulence. The recent surge of climate-themed art, short films, and musical expressions points toward a generational attempt to narrativise trauma. Documentaries featuring disappearing coastlines, climate refugees in the Sundarbans, or the ecological toll of brick kilns have moved from niche academic spaces into mainstream consciousness.

In elite circles, conversations about climate resilience often revolve around infrastructure, financing, and diplomacy. But resilience, as Cunsolo suggests, must include emotional fortification. This does not mean suppressing grief, but creating communal spaces to acknowledge it. In Bangladesh, however, there is a cultural reluctance to discuss mental health, particularly among youth. 

Emotional distress is often stigmatised, seen as weakness or ingratitude. This makes climate grief doubly invisible-first as an emotional experience, and then as an illegitimate one. Without language or legitimacy, many young Bangladeshis suffer in silence. Their despair is not just about polar bears or melting glaciers. It is about their younger siblings coughing in the heat. It is about the boy who drowned on his way to school. It is about seeing their ancestral land dissolve into the sea, pixel by pixel on Google Maps.

What makes climate grief especially cruel is its temporal nature. It is grief for a future that hasn't fully arrived, for losses that are anticipated but inevitable. 

Education, often portrayed as the great equaliser, is also failing to address this emotional crisis. Curricula in most Bangladeshi schools and universities continue to treat climate change as a scientific phenomenon rather than a social and emotional one. 

Very few programmes teach students how to cope with climate-induced despair, how to mourn the loss of environmental belonging, or how to navigate the ethical complexities of adaptation in a country so vulnerable yet so peripheral in global emissions. This lack of emotional pedagogy renders young people unprepared for the psychic demands of a warming world.

Moreover, the notion of agency-so central to youth empowerment discourses-is deeply fraught in this context. Telling young Bangladeshis that they are the "last generation that can stop climate change" is not only inaccurate, given the structural nature of global emissions, but also psychologically burdensome.

It places the weight of planetary salvation on shoulders already hunched from the pressures of economic insecurity, academic stress, and familial duty. Climate grief in Bangladesh is thus not only about environmental loss, but about emotional exploitation, where hope is weaponised as responsibility.

But there are also quiet forms of resilience emerging. In informal learning circles, climate cafés, rural youth groups, and social media collectives, young people are beginning to name their grief and share their stories. These are not just sites of activism but sanctuaries of emotional recognition. In universities like BRAC and Dhaka University, students are pushing for courses that integrate ecological ethics with emotional literacy. Mental health NGOs are slowly beginning to recognise climate-related distress in their counseling frameworks. These shifts, though nascent, signal an important recognition that healing and justice must go hand in hand.

To support the emotional lives of Bangladesh's youth in the age of climate collapse, we must create architectures of care. This includes climate-aware counseling services in schools, culturally sensitive mental health campaigns, and a broader societal shift that legitimises grief as a rational, even necessary, response to an irrational world. 

Ashlee Cunsolo and Vanessa Andreotti compel us to take seriously the emotional labour of climate survival. In Bangladesh, this means recognising that young people are not just fighting floods and heatwaves. They are fighting despair. They are confronting the end of imaginaries-the loss of futures they were socialised to believe in. Their grief is not a failure of resilience. It is a testament to how much they care.

In a world that is slowly losing its ability to grieve, perhaps Bangladesh's youth are reminding us of a painful but profound truth. To feel deeply is not to be weak. To mourn is not to give up. It is to love what is disappearing so fiercely that one refuses to look away. And in that refusal lies a new kind of strength-not the strength of denial, but of witnessing, remembering, and rebuilding in the shadow of loss.

Dr Matiur Rahman is a researcher and development professional.

matiurrahman588@gmail.com