The state of climate change adaptation research in Bangladesh: a systematic literature review

This article explores the drivers, benefits, and challenges to climate change adaptation in Bangladesh. It specifically investigates the "Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change through Coastal Afforestation Program," a 5-year $5 million adaptation scheme being funded and implemented in part by the Government of Bangladesh, United Nations Development Program, and Global Environment Facility. The article explores how the CBACC-CA builds various types of adaptive capacity in Bangladesh and the extent its design and implementation offers lessons for other adaptation programs around the world. The first part of the study begins by describing its research methods consisting of research interviews, site visits, and a literature review. It then summarizes six primary sectors vulnerable to climate change in Bangladesh: water resources and coastal zones, infrastructure and human settlements, agriculture and food security, forestry and biodiversity, fisheries, and human health. The article next describes the genesis and background behind the CBACC-CA, with an emphasis on components that promote capacity development, demonstration projects, risk reduction, and knowledge management. The article concludes that technology by itself is only a partial component of successful adaptation efforts, and that multiple and integrated adaptation measures that cut across sectors and social, institutional, and infrastructural dimensions are needed to truly build resilience and effectiveness.

Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 2020

Climate change is a leading threat to sustainable socioeconomic development in Bangladesh. Adverse impacts of climatic disasters including flash floods, recurrent cyclones and erratic rainfall patterns are already causing hardship for both rural and urban people and are expected to accelerate into the future. The aim of this research note is to identify the core contributing economic sectors to climate change in Bangladesh, and to consider effective mitigation strategies. Following the 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (2014), in this paper, we argue that comprehensive mitigation measures are required in the energy, transport, buildings, industry and land-use sectors to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Our findings indicate that it is crucial that government and non-government mitigation efforts engage with community knowledge practices in order to most effectively reduce GHG emissions and combat the adverse impacts of climate change.

Climate and Development, 2009

This paper explores the relationship between environmental change and development through a vulnerability study of a rural village in southwest Bangladesh. Villagers deal with a variety of pressing stresses, and climate change is not considered separately, if at all. Environmental, political and economic conditions and adjustments in resource use systems, particularly shrimp farming, have changed livelihood opportunities and increased the vulnerabilities of poor villagers to future environmental changes, including climate change. Practical adaptation strategies to reduce vulnerabilities to climate-related stresses reflect the dynamics of people's livelihoods and address the conditions they currently face. In this case, planned adaptations were mainstreamed in the sense that they contributed to the livelihoods of people and made some improvement in their capacity to deal with changes in climate, and they were undertaken via established non-government institutions.

2014

Ecosystem-based approaches to adaptation (EbA) involve the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services to help people adapt to the adverse effects of climate change. Those who are most vulnerable to climate change are often highly reliant on the natural environment for their lives and livelihoods, and ecosystems and the services they provide are already central to many adaptation strategies. This paper describes two components of effective EbA: ecosystem resilience and the maintenance of ecosystem services. Research assesses how effectively EbA supports community adaptive capacity and resilience at two Action Research for Community Adaptation in Bangladesh (ARCAB) sites. Findings suggest that more attention should be paid to EbA as an important response to climate change. Contents Summary 4 8 Discussion Resilience from Diversity Shifts and Thresholds in Ecosystems Reaching the Most Vulnerable Trade-offs Institutions, policies and governance 9 Conclusions References www.iied.org EcosystEm-basEd approachEs to adaptation | EvidEncE from two sitEs in BangladEsh 4 www.iied.org Action Research for Community Adaptation in Bangladesh (ARCAB) is a long-term action research programme that aims to address knowledge gaps and provide evidence for the effectiveness of Community Based Adaptation (CBA). ARCAB Action Partners include ActionAid, CARE, Caritas Bangladesh, Christian Aid, Concern Worldwide, oxfam gB, Islamic Relief Worldwide, Plan International, Practical Action and WaterAid, all of which work with poor communities in specific locations to address climate change. The ARCAB programme has a number of core action research themes, one of which is EbA. This paper describes research conducted under ARCAB that seeks to improve the evidence relating to EbA effectiveness from two ARCAB study sites.

2018

A climate-resilient and sustainable future for people in vulnerable countries starts with resilient livelihoods. There is an urgent need to turn knowledge around livelihood threats, shocks, trajectories and opportunities into operable solutions. This factsheet presents the key findings coming out of Gibika, a five-year research-to-action project, advancing the understanding of people’s responses to climatic changes and environmental stress in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a country with a wide variety of environmental stressors. The fact that people are struggling with different stressors in different regions also makes their needs and responses very diverse. Clear differences were observed between the northern, central and southern study sites. For example, in the northern study sites people were facing drought and shifting rainy seasons, while in the southern and central study sites people were dealing with stressors such as riverbank erosion, cyclones and floods. In the southern and central study sites people described struggling more with the environmental impacts than in the northern study sites, and they found themselves and their livelihoods failing to cope with the stress. This factsheet presents six key conclusions, as well as voices from the people which we hope will guide and support policy makers and practitioners in their work to better protect the most vulnerable from climatic risks.

Regional Environmental Change

In this paper, we present the results of a systematic literature review of climate change vulnerability-related research conducted in Bangladesh between 1994 and 2017 in order to identify trends and knowledge gaps. Our results identify interesting evolutions in the temporal and spatial scales of study and the nature of spatial and thematic associations, suggesting important knowledge gaps in the existing literature that likely limit understandings of scale-sensitive climate change impacts. We also observed a temporal mismatch between the published studies and policy-making processes focused on adaptation and mitigation and a bias towards the economic aspects of climate change, with less focus on social and environmental issues. Thematically, the climate changerelated scholarship in Bangladesh would benefit from more integrative, cross-theme, and transdisciplinary studies, potentially drawing on the different theoretical constructs of vulnerability and adaptation. Such studies will be needed to better support evidence-based public policy and also to more accurately reflect the diversity of knowledge gaps and challenges concerning climatic stresses in Bangladesh at different scales and in different contexts.

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2013

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

2013

Adaptation is a policy instrument for facing the challenges posed by climate change. Government pursues adaptation in different ways aside from simply creating awareness about climate change and its effects. It makes rules for changing behaviour and practices which include National Action Plans, building codes, standardisations and so forth; provides loans to the affected communities, facilitates insurances, takes measures to correct market imperfections and grants financial incentives or discourages a specific behaviour through taxation; and strengthens institutional capacity, develops skills, supplies emergency relief and arranges rehabilitation, as well as constructing physical infrastructures, and repairing and maintaining the existing ones. These initiatives require additional resources and efforts which the developing countries, the most vulnerable to climate change, are unable to afford. For this reason, government needs to mainstream adaptation into their development plannin...

Journal Article, 2024

Though climate change is a global crisis, it has harmful effects on the lives and livelihoods at the local level and agriculture is one of the most vulnerable sectors exposed to this issue. The present study aims to explore the impacts of climate change on the agricultural sector and adaptation in a riverine village in Bangladesh. Utilizing mixed methods, this study attempts to unravel the disastrous impacts of climate change on the agricultural sector including reduced quality of agro-ingredients and lower rates of crop production that eventually disrupt the lives and livelihoods of the peasants. However, people in that village tend to adopt different adaptation strategies to combat such effects. In this regard, they make their decisions based on the types of calamities by utilizing local knowledge and perceptions, intuitions and experiments, and institutional guidance.

This paper discusses several adaptation practices in response to, or in anticipation of, real or perceived climate stressors in the coastal region of Bangladesh, which is vulnerable to several natural disasters and potential climate change impacts. In order to analyze these adaptations, an inventory was prepared to collect evidence of adaptation to climate change under an international collaborative project. In this article, five important adaptation practices have been discussed based on criteria such as geographical location, adaption providers, sustainability and gender perspectives, vulnerability and system resilience. These practices are construction of cyclone shelter, pond sand filter (PSF), cultivation of saline tolerant rice variety, floating garden and dyke cropping. These practices have been found to be sustainable due to their effectiveness, benefits to the stakeholders, high public acceptance and accessibility. They also have some barriers including site selection, poor operation and maintenance, non-availability of resources, lack of capacity of the local people for implementation and funds. In spite of barriers, these measures have reduced livelihood vulnerability of the local people by increasing productivity and income and providing food security. Thus, these adaptations are expected to be successful in combating future changed climate in coastal Bangladesh, once barriers are eliminated and associated policies and frameworks are implemented by the responsible authorities and organizations.