Protecting the Sundarbans from commercial exploitation
We have a weird way of loving nature in Bangladesh. We admire a forest as long as we can put a resort beside it.
We celebrate a river as long as there is a restaurant overlooking it. We call a place ‘eco’ as soon as bamboo and thatch appear on the outside of a concrete building.
Somewhere between appreciating nature and selling an experience of nature, we have forgotten a basic distinction: not everything beautiful needs to become a business.
The growing resort industry around the Sundarbans should therefore worry us for a reason larger than the number of buildings being constructed. The real danger is the gradual conversion of wilderness into a consumer product.
Once a forest becomes a tourism brand, every part of it acquires a price: the view, the riverbank, the silence, the wildlife and eventually even the feeling of being somewhere untouched by modern life.
The Sundarbans is particularly vulnerable to this logic because its attraction is precisely its wildness.
People do not travel there to see another urban landscape with better decoration. They go to see something that cities cannot manufacture.
Yet we are increasingly trying to manufacture that experience around the forest with resorts, generators, restaurants, music, boats and organised entertainment.
A recent Samakal report offers an unsettling picture of how quickly this transformation is taking place.
It found 21 resorts and cottages built around the Sundarbans over the past seven to eight years, with another 10 reportedly in the process of being developed.
Some are being built around Dhangmari, Chila, Chandpai and other areas adjoining the forest.
The report also found allegations of tree cutting, wetland filling, concrete construction, night-time music and barbecue parties, as well as unauthorised tourist movement through forest canals.
But the most revealing part of the story is not the construction itself. It is the regulatory vacuum surrounding it.
The area within 10 kilometres of the Sundarbans was declared an Environmentally Critical Area in 1999.
Commercial and industrial infrastructure is restricted there, while environmental permission is required for other developments.
Yet the report says the resorts it examined had not obtained the necessary permission.
It also found that none of the resorts in Khulna had formal registration under the relevant hotel and restaurant regulations.
This is how environmental degradation becomes normal. A building appears. Nobody stops it.
A second one follows. A third is defended as necessary for tourism. Soon there are workers, investors, customers and local economic interests attached to the industry.
By the time someone asks whether the development was appropriate in the first place, the question has become politically and economically inconvenient. The Sundarbans cannot afford that sequence.
There is an important distinction here. Tourism is not the enemy of conservation. In fact, properly designed ecotourism can give local communities an economic stake in protecting natural resources.
Bangladesh’s own Forest Department promotes ecotourism in designated areas while imposing limits intended to prevent disturbance to wildlife.
A 2025 master plan was also formulated to promote tourism while preserving the ecological integrity of the Sundarbans and supporting local communities.
The problem begins when tourism stops being a means of experiencing nature and becomes an excuse for reshaping it.
There is a world of difference between taking visitors into a forest under controlled conditions and building a mini-tourism economy to its doorstep.
The first can make people more conscious of what needs protecting. The second can gradually alter the very environment people came to experience.
Consider what a resort requires. It needs electricity, water, food, transport and waste disposal. It creates sewage. It creates plastic. It creates noise. It brings boats and vehicles. It requires land, roads, workers and supplies.
None of these things are catastrophic. But ecological systems do not experience development one project at a time, they experience the accumulated pressure.
The Dhangmari Canal is a useful warning. The report says around 10 resorts have emerged around the canal, which is associated with dolphin habitat, while boats carry tourists through the area and wastewater is reportedly discharged into forest canals.
The question is not whether one boat or one generator can destroy the Sundarbans.
The question is what happens when hundreds of small disturbances become permanent features of the landscape.
Noise is particularly easy for humans to underestimate. We hear music and experience entertainment. Wildlife experiences intrusion. We see artificial lights as decoration.
Animals experience a change in their habitat. We see a tourist boat as transport. A sensitive aquatic ecosystem experiences repeated traffic.
This is why the phrase ‘eco-resort’ deserves scrutiny rather than applause. Environmentalism cannot be established by architecture alone. A building covered with bamboo can still have a carbon footprint.
A resort can employ local people and still put pressure on the environment. A tourism project can generate income and still be poorly located.
The economic argument also needs greater honesty. The report says most resorts employ only around five to seven local people, largely in cleaning, security, food service and other support jobs.
It also notes that investors who previously operated tourism businesses in places such as St Martin’s and Bandarban are now moving into the Sundarbans.
There is nothing inherently wrong with outside investment. But if the forest provides the attraction, local communities should not merely become the low-wage workforce serving visitors who arrive to consume it.
Genuine community-based tourism should give local people meaningful ownership, decision-making power and a fair share of the economic benefits.
We also need to stop pretending that every tourist must be accommodated immediately beside every natural attraction.
Perhaps the most sustainable tourism model is sometimes to keep the hotel farther away and take visitors into the forest under carefully regulated conditions. Convenience for tourists should not automatically override ecological limits.
The World Bank has made a similar point in its work on the Sundarbans, warning that poorly regulated mass tourism can degrade natural resources and recommending that tourism be limited according to the carrying capacity of fragile parts of the ecosystem.
That principle should be at the heart of Bangladesh’s tourism policy: the forest should determine the scale of tourism, not the other way around.
This also means that enforcement cannot begin after the resorts have become established.
If a project requires environmental clearance, the clearance must come before construction. If registration is mandatory, an unregistered establishment should not be allowed to operate indefinitely.
If tourists are prohibited from entering certain canals or forest areas, resort operators should not be permitted to turn illegal access into a tourist attraction.
Otherwise, regulation becomes theatre. The law exists on paper while the business exists on the ground.
St Martin’s offers a warning because restrictions eventually became necessary after years of intense tourism pressure.
The lesson should not be that every tourist destination must eventually be rescued by prohibition.
The lesson should be that environmental regulation is most effective when it prevents irreversible commercial expansion rather than trying to undo it later.
The Sundarbans still has something that money cannot easily recreate: silence, uncertainty and wilderness. Its greatest tourism asset is the fact that it has not yet become a theme park.
We should be careful not to sell that asset away.
The question Bangladesh must answer is therefore not whether the Sundarbans needs tourism.
The real question is how much tourism the forest can tolerate, who should benefit from it, where that tourism should take place and what activities must remain off limits.
If we cannot answer those questions before the next resort is built, then we are not developing ecotourism. We are simply commercialising the forest and giving the process a greener name.
(Writer: An academic, journalist and political analyst, teaches at International University of Business, Agriculture and Technology)
