Coping and resilience in riverine Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the impacts of two successive years of severe floods on households, their coping strategies and resilience to riverine hazards in northern Bangladesh. Based on focus groups and interviews with the same households after floods in 2016 and 2017, we found a cumulative decline in assets through sale of livestock and borrowing, and almost all households evacuated short term to higher places. Three notable recent ways that vulnerable households use socio-hydrological landscapes to enhance their resilience to hazards were revealed. Firstly, local flood protection embankments were the main destination for evacuation and were highly valued as safe places, although they breached and failed to protect the land. Secondly, community organisations, formed mainly for livelihood enhancement, took initiatives to provide warnings, to help households relocate during floods, and to access relief and rehabilitation services. Thirdly, seasonal migration by men, particularly to urban areas, is an important element of long-term coping and resilience based on diversified livelihoods for about 70% of these rural households. Although the unintended use of infrastructure, social capital and urban opportunities all form part of coping and resilience strategies in hazardous riverine landscapes, the high mobility that they are based on is not supported by enabling policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Bangladesh
• erosion
• flood
• infrastructure
• migration
• socio-hydrology

Acknowledgements

This paper is an output of the project ‘Hydro-Social Deltas’: Understanding flows of water and people to improve policies and strategies for disaster risk reduction and sustainable development of delta areas in the Netherlands and Bangladesh. We are grateful to our colleagues, the leaders of the participating Community-Based Organisations, and the flood-affected households interviewed for their assistance and cooperation. We thank Md. Ruknul Ferdous for contributions to the literature review and Michelle Kooy for guidance and comments on the study. We are grateful to Professor Edmund Penning-Rowsell, Dr Brian Cook, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments and suggestions which have improved this paper. The views expressed are those of the authors alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The river known as the Brahmaputra in India continues to be known by that name in Bangladesh as far as the southern tip of Kurigram District, but further downstream is called the Jamuna River. The former course of the river (now a minor off-shoot to the east) continues to be named the (Old) Brahmaputra River.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) Urbanising Deltas of the World programme under grant number W 07.69.110.