Every monsoon season in Sri Lanka now arrives with familiar images: submerged homes in low lying districts, landslides tearing through plantation settlements in the hill country, families displaced overnight, roads collapsing under floodwaters and emergency relief distributed after devastation has already occurred.

These disasters are often framed as unavoidable consequences of climate change. Rainfall patterns are becoming more erratic. Flood cycles are intensifying. Landslide prone areas continue to expand. Climate science explains the hazards clearly but hazards alone do not explain why the same communities remain repeatedly exposed. The 2021 X-Press Pearl maritime disaster, contaminated large stretches of the western coastline after a cargo ship carrying hazardous chemicals caught fire and sank off Colombo. Thousands of fishing families lost their livelihoods almost overnight as toxic debris washed ashore and fishing bans were imposed across coastal districts. While the incident was triggered by an industrial accident, its impacts revealed how environmental risk and economic vulnerability overlap most severely for communities already living with insecure livelihoods, limited state protection and high dependence on climate-sensitive ecosystems.

To read the full story visit https://groundviews.org/2026/05/13/inherited-risk-colonial-legacies-and-climate-vulnerability-in-sri-lanka-part-1/