Behra is among hundreds of people from the disappearing and largely abandoned coastal village of Satabhaya, whose displaced former residents have been officially recognised by the government as climate migrants.She grew up watching helplessly with her neighbours as rising seas, driven by climate change and upriver dams, slowly claimed the land around them.'We were doing well there. We used to catch fish,' the 34-year-old told AFP. 'But the sea came nearer and took away our homes.
But an upriver dam-building spree in the decades since India's independence from Britain in 1947 drastically cut the amount of sediment deposited where the waterways met the sea.That left Odisha's coasts vulnerable to erosion and lacking a critical defence against rising sea levels.Across the state, sea levels increased by an average of 19 centimetres in the five decades to 2015, according to a 2022 paper coauthored by researchers from the state's Berhampur University.