Teachers on the Frontline: Climate Disasters and the Missing Link in Bangladesh's Schools
Every year, when the floods come, Bangladesh responds. Volunteers are mobilised. Early warnings go out. Relief reaches communities faster than it did a decade ago. The system, built over decades of painful learning, works.
And yet, every year, the same schools close. The same children fall behind. The same girls do not come back.
Something is being missed and it sits right at the centre of the education system. Climate education in Bangladesh is still treated as optional. It appears in policy documents. It is referenced in curriculum frameworks. But in practice, in the schools that need it most, it is rarely taught, rarely prioritised, and almost never embedded in how teachers are trained or supported. That gap is not a minor oversight. In a country facing a massive scale of climate disruption, it is a serious problem.
What 2024 Showed Us
2024 was, even by Bangladesh's standards, relentless. Heatwaves in April and May forced a nationwide school shutdown, classrooms were reaching above 42°C, making them physically unsafe. Before schools had fully reopened, Cyclone Remal struck the southwestern coast in late May. Flash floods then swept through the Haor region in June, inundating 75 percent of Sylhet district. By August, a new wave of flooding had closed more than 7,000 schools across Chittagong, Feni, Cumilla, and Khagrachhari, leaving 175,000 primary students without access to education. Children in Sylhet lost up to eight cumulative weeks of schooling across the year. In Khulna, Chattogram, and Rangpur, it was six weeks each.
These are not isolated events anymore. They are the pattern. And they are accelerating.
What this means for teachers is something that does not always make it into situation reports. Teachers were not just watching this happen, they were in the middle of it. Managing frightened children. Opening school buildings as community shelters. Trying to track down students displaced by the floods. Then, when the water subsided, being expected to resume normal classes in damaged rooms with exhausted children, no recovery support, and no guidance on how to address what students had just been through.
None of this is in a teacher's job description. None of it is in their training.
The Problem Is Not Teachers - It’ Is What We Ask of Them Without Preparing Them
In Kurigram's Ulipur upazila, the Principal of Satdargah Balika Alim Madrasha, Md Nazrul Islam, described something that has become a quiet but growing concern in the region - lightning. Over the past few years, lightning strikes have become noticeably more frequent, and people in the area have died as a result. Last year, a tree on the madrasha premises was struck, it stood right beside a classroom. In response, teachers made a practical decision: they planted Palmyra Palms around the school boundary, a natural buffer known to attract and absorb lightning strikes, to protect students moving around the grounds.
But the response did not stop at the physical. Teachers now watch the sky during school hours. When they see lightning during closing time, they hold students back, delaying the end of the school day rather than sending children out into the open where they could be struck on their way home. They also teach students what to do when lightning strikes: where to take shelter, what to avoid, how to stay safe.
This is climate adaptation happening at the school level - practical, locally driven, and entirely outside any formal training or government guidance. It is also a sign of how much is being left to individual schools to figure out on their own.
In Bogura, something different but equally telling is happening. Shahanaj Parvin, an Assistant Teacher at Sherpur Sadar Model Primary School, works in a school that has not directly faced a major disaster. Her students are not surrounded by flood-prone chars or cyclone-exposed coastlines. And yet she felt a responsibility she could not ignore.
She is aware of what climate change is doing across Bangladesh and beyond. She also knows that her students will not stay in Bogura, they will move across the country and the world for study and work, into communities and contexts that may be far more exposed than the one they grew up in. If they leave school without understanding climate risk, without knowing how to prepare or respond, that is a gap they will carry with them.
So, she acted. Without any instruction from above, she built a contingency plan for her school, formed a student disaster taskforce, and ran drills. She is teaching students about disasters and preparedness not because her school is in the path of a cyclone, but because she understands that climate knowledge is not local, it is a life skill.
Both of these teachers, Nazrul Islam in Kurigram and Shahanaj Parvin in Bogura, achieved something real. But they did it entirely on their own initiative, with no training, no institutional support, and no formal mandate to do what they did. That is the honest reality. Bangladesh has teachers doing extraordinary things in the face of and in anticipation of climate disasters. The system has largely left them to figure it out alone.
These are not solutions. They are workarounds. And the fact that they have been going on for years, with little systemic response, says something important about how seriously climate education and teacher preparedness is actually taken.
What the Research Confirms
A study published in 2026, based on in-depth interviews with 30 primary teachers in Shyamnagar sub-district in Satkhira, one of the most climate-exposed coastal areas in the country, bordering the Sundarbans, found that climate change content is scattered across the curriculum, professional development on the topic is minimal, and teachers lack both localised materials and institutional guidance. Many could not clearly distinguish between weather and climate. Their understanding of local hazards came from living in affected communities, not from any formal training.
This matters because Satkhira is not an edge case. It is representative of what research consistently finds across Bangladesh's climate-vulnerable districts. Teachers know their communities are at risk. They do not have the tools, the training or the institutional backing to do much about it.
Bangladesh does have policies that acknowledge climate and disaster risk in education. The frameworks exist. The references are there. But acknowledgement in a policy document and actual practice in a classroom are two very different things. Across teacher training systems, school-level risk planning and education continuity, the translation from policy to practice has simply not happened at any meaningful scale.
Policy is not the problem. Implementation is.
Bangladesh's DRR Story Has a Gap Nobody Talks About
Bangladesh is genuinely admired globally for what it has built on disaster risk reduction. The Cyclone Preparedness Programme, co-managed with the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, now operates with more than 76,000 trained volunteers and has reduced cyclone deaths from hundreds of thousands in 1970 to just 26 during Cyclone Amphan in 2020. Anticipatory action frameworks are being activated before cyclones make landfall. Early warnings reach remote communities. These are real achievements.
But walk into a school in the coastal belt, in a Haor district, in a char community and you find something different. The teacher has no disaster management protocol. No DRR training. No plan for what happens to students if the school becomes a shelter. No guidance on learning continuity if classes are suspended for weeks. The community around the school may be increasingly prepared. The school itself often is not.
This is the gap that does not feature in Bangladesh's DRR success story, because education tends to be treated as a sector that responds after disasters, not one that needs to be prepared before them. Climate education in particular is seen as a curriculum issue - something to be addressed through textbook revision rather than as a core component of disaster preparedness. That framing has to change.
What Actually Needs to Happen
Teacher training needs to treat DRR and climate literacy as essential, not supplementary. Right now, disaster risk management, climate change fundamentals and basic psychosocial support are not standard parts of how teachers are trained at pre-service or in-service level. They need to be. Particularly for teachers working in high-risk areas, the gap between what they know and what their communities face is too wide to leave unaddressed.
Schools in climate-vulnerable areas need practical, functional disaster management plans, not documents that sit in a drawer, but plans that are practised, updated, and connected to local early warning systems and upazila education offices. Head teachers need to know what to do when a warning comes, who to contact, how to communicate with families and how to maintain some form of learning when physical schools are inaccessible.
And climate education needs to be reframed, not as an environmental topic that competes with maths and Bangla for curriculum space, but as risk communication that is relevant to every subject and every community. Children who understand why floods are worsening, what salinity is doing to their coast, and how to respond to a heat warning are not just better-informed students. They are more resilient people. Their families are more resilient because of them. Teachers who can deliver that kind of education are doing something that extends far beyond the classroom.
Where This Leaves Us
Bangladesh's teachers are not failing. They are doing remarkable things under pressure, with almost no support, year after year. The teachers in Kurigram and Bogura are proof of what is possible when someone decides to take this seriously.
The question is why it still depends on individual teachers deciding to take it seriously, rather than on a system that equips all of them to do so.
Climate education is not optional in a country where 33 million children had their schooling disrupted by climate disasters in a single year. It is not a curriculum add-on or a development priority to be addressed when more urgent things are done. It is part of the basic infrastructure of a functioning, resilient education system and Bangladesh, which has proven it can build world-class resilience infrastructure when it commits to doing so, has not yet applied that same commitment to its classrooms.
That needs to change. Teachers on the frontline deserve better than improvising alone.
About the Author
The author is a development practitioner engaged in climate education, disaster risk reduction, communication, and youth skill development. Her work centers on storytelling and disaster communication as tools for community learning, capacity strengthening, and advocacy, with a focus on translating field insights into policy advocacy and evidence-based recommendations. She can be reached at: [email protected]