Bangladesh is often described as one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. Rising sea levels, flooding, salinity intrusion, soil degradation, and rapid urbanization pose growing challenges to food security and rural livelihoods. As the country searches for sustainable pathways into the future, permaculture offers valuable insights that deserve greater attention.
Permaculture emerged in the 1970s as a response to the ecological and social consequences of industrial agriculture. Rather than relying on monocultures, heavy chemical inputs, and extractive practices, permaculture seeks to design productive systems that work with nature. It combines ecological principles with practical solutions for food production, water management, soil regeneration, and community resilience.
Two examples illustrate this potential with particular clarity. In the Rohingya camps of Cox’s Bazar, where families are confined to small plots of degraded land, permaculture techniques have enabled refugees to grow vegetables and herbs that not only increase nutritional intake but noticeably improve the taste and variety of food — small gains that carry enormous dignity and meaning in conditions of displacement. In the coastal region of the Sundarbans, where salinity and tidal flooding make conventional farming increasingly unreliable, permaculture’s integrated approach — combining salt-tolerant species, raised bed cultivation, and water harvesting — is helping communities maintain food production in the face of accelerating climate stress.
What makes permaculture particularly interesting is that it is both a grassroots movement and an emerging academic field. Over the past decades, universities, researchers, and development practitioners have increasingly recognized its potential to address environmental and social challenges. Yet its greatest strength remains its practical application in the real world.
The legacy of Rosemary Morrow
Few people represent this spirit better than Rosemary Morrow. Throughout her life, she dedicated herself to bringing permaculture knowledge to communities facing hardship. Bangladesh has always been close to her heart — she invested significantly in teacher training and community work on the ground, building local capacity that continues to this day. Her work extended far beyond classrooms and conferences. Every program was delivered where it was needed most — in villages, fields, and communities, never in conference rooms or city hotels. She worked directly with farmers, refugees, women, and local communities in developing countries, helping them restore degraded land, improve food production, and build resilience with locally available resources.
Rosemary Morrow’s approach is especially relevant for Bangladesh — and many of its core principles are already embedded in traditional Bangladeshi agricultural practice. The baira system of floating gardens, practiced for centuries in the waterlogged haors of Barisal and Gopalganj, is a striking example. Farmers build rafts of decomposing water hyacinth and organic matter, creating fertile growing platforms that rise and fall with the floods rather than fighting them. In coastal areas such as the Sundarbans fringe, communities have long developed integrated homestead agroforestry systems — combining fruit trees, vegetables, medicinal plants, and small livestock within a single family compound. These multi-layered gardens mirror the stacking principle central to permaculture design, maximizing yield from minimal land while maintaining ecological balance.
A framework for regeneration
In coastal regions, permaculture principles can further support communities adapting to salinity and changing water conditions. In villages, regenerative agriculture can improve soil health while reducing dependence on costly external inputs. In rapidly growing cities such as Dhaka, rooftop farming has emerged as a quiet revolution — thousands of households have turned rooftops into productive gardens, advancing food security, community well-being, and urban cooling through the simple act of planting where they live. Across the country, permaculture can support biodiversity, local food systems, and climate adaptation.
Perhaps the most important lesson from Rosemary Morrow’s legacy is that sustainable development begins with people. Her work demonstrated that solutions are most effective when they are developed with communities rather than imposed upon them. Knowledge-sharing, local participation, and practical action are at the heart of her approach.
As Bangladesh continues its development journey, permaculture should not be viewed simply as an alternative farming method. It can be understood as a framework for regeneration — one that connects environmental restoration, food security, community empowerment, and long-term resilience. The country’s farmers and communities are already practicing many of its principles. What permaculture offers is a shared language and design framework that can strengthen, connect, and scale what people already know how to do.
The legacy of Rosemary Morrow reminds us that meaningful change often begins at the local level: in the floating gardens of Barisal, the homestead plots of the Sundarbans, a rooftop in Dhaka, or a community coming together to restore what the changing climate threatens to take. In Bangladesh, where the need for resilient and regenerative solutions has never been greater, her vision remains both relevant and inspiring. Working in her footsteps here is both a privilege and a responsibility.