Before sunrise, Bilkis Khatun steps into the yard outside her home in Dumuria village on Bangladesh's southwestern coast.
The first task is watering the vegetables growing beside a small pond she dug herself to collect rainwater. Then come the chickens, breakfast for her three children, household chores and, if the weather allows, more work in the garden.
By nightfall, she has rarely stopped moving.
Her husband spends months at a time in Dhaka and elsewhere looking for work after rising salinity made farming on the family's land increasingly difficult. Sometimes he sends money home. Sometimes he cannot.
The household now depends largely on what Bilkis can grow and manage herself.
"If I spent the entire day doing this work somewhere else, I could earn much more," she said. "But I can't leave my children."
Across Bangladesh's coastal districts, stories like hers have become increasingly common.
Climate change is reshaping not only the landscape but also the division of labor inside rural households. As crop yields decline, freshwater becomes harder to find and seasonal employment disappears, more men are leaving villages in search of work.
Women are increasingly responsible for farming, caring for children and elderly family members, raising livestock, collecting water and managing households — work that often stretches from dawn until late at night but rarely generates a formal income.
The changes are most visible in districts such as Satkhira, Khulna and Bagerhat, where saltwater intrusion has transformed agriculture over the past two decades.
In Gabura Union of Shyamnagar Upazila, freshwater is scarce enough that many women still walk several kilometers each day simply to collect drinking water. During the dry season, the journey can become longer as nearby ponds dry up or become too saline for household use.
The hours spent carrying water are only one part of a workload that economists say remains largely invisible.
According to Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and UN Women estimates, unpaid household and care work accounts for the equivalent of between one-fifth and nearly one-third of Bangladesh's gross domestic product.
Women spend five to seven times longer than men on unpaid domestic work, according to the country's Time Use Survey, much of it devoted to cooking, childcare, collecting water and fuel, and caring for livestock.
Because these activities are not bought or sold, they do not appear in conventional measures of economic output.
"Climate change-induced male migration is shifting agricultural responsibilities onto women," said Dr. Mustafa K. Mujeri, former director general of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies. "The risks come from women's limited access to land, credit and technology, together with the burden of unpaid household work."
Those constraints shape everyday decisions.
Nazma Khatun, 40, lives on the homestead left by her late husband in the same union. She wanted to borrow money from a bank to expand duck and poultry farming but was unable to qualify because she did not own land in her own name.
Without land ownership, access to formal agricultural finance remains difficult for many rural women, even when they are effectively managing farms themselves.
Nazma eventually received a small loan through the Local Environment Development and Agricultural Research Society, or LEDARS, a local nonprofit working in climate-affected communities.
The investment allowed her to begin raising poultry and earning an income.
"It changed my life," she said.
Economists say her experience illustrates a wider structural problem rather than an isolated case.
Agricultural support systems in Bangladesh have historically been designed around male landowners. Women who cultivate land, manage livestock or oversee household food production frequently remain outside formal definitions of farmers, limiting their access to government incentives, agricultural extension services and institutional credit.
Dr Mujeri argues that future reforms will require expanding recognition of women as farmers in their own right, alongside broader access to finance and technology.
The environmental pressures continue to grow.
Salinity now affects much of Bangladesh's southwestern coastline, reducing crop productivity and contaminating freshwater sources. Communities increasingly rely on rainwater harvesting or distant water points to meet basic household needs.
For women, who shoulder most domestic responsibilities, water scarcity translates directly into longer working days.
Health workers say prolonged exposure to saline water is also taking a toll.
Dr Nahid Nazrul, director of Friendship Hospital in Khulna, said urinary tract infections, reproductive health complications and skin diseases have become increasingly common among women in coastal communities.
Pregnant women face additional risks, including hypertension and pre-eclampsia associated with high salinity in drinking water, conditions linked to premature births and low birth weight.
Agriculture itself is adapting.
The Department of Agricultural Extension has introduced salt-tolerant crop varieties across affected districts, while local organizations promote rainwater harvesting, floating agriculture and other climate-adaptive techniques.
Yet adoption remains uneven, particularly among women farmers with limited access to training or financial resources.
"Salinity is our greatest challenge," said Waliul Islam, agriculture officer for Shyamnagar Upazila. "Women farmers still receive limited access to specialized agricultural training and credit."
Local organisations have sought to fill some of those gaps.
With support from the Government of Sweden through Manusher Jonno Foundation, the Community-based Climate Resilience and Women's Empowerment programme works across coastal communities to improve water management, strengthen livelihoods and expand women's access to public services and local decision-making.
The initiative also supports alternative income-generating activities, climate adaptation measures and efforts to reduce gender-based violence and child marriage.
Shaheen Anam, executive director of Manusher Jonno Foundation, said the larger challenge extends beyond individual projects.
"Women's work is still not properly recognised," she said. "Much of what they do has no market price, so it remains invisible."
That invisibility increasingly defines life along Bangladesh's climate frontier.
Women now perform many of the agricultural tasks once shared with men while continuing to carry primary responsibility for unpaid household work.
They cultivate vegetables in small homestead gardens, care for livestock, harvest rainwater, manage food supplies and keep households functioning as climate pressures reshape rural livelihoods.
The transformation has occurred gradually, without attracting much national attention.
Yet in villages scattered across Bangladesh's southwest, it has quietly altered the country's agricultural workforce.
As climate change redraws the boundaries of farming, women like Bilkis Khatun have become central to sustaining rural families.
Their work rarely appears in official economic statistics, but it increasingly determines whether households can remain on the land or join the growing stream of migrants leaving Bangladesh's vulnerable coast in search of a more secure future.
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