Changing local weather and adaptation in two coastal villages in Bangladesh

Abstract

Coastal Bangladesh is experiencing the effects of weather and climate-related stressors. The paper reports on the ways in which members of nine occupational groups in two coastal villages in South-west Bangladesh understand and respond differentially to recent changes in local weather and weather-related events and processes. Their understanding is grounded in local experiences and varied livelihood options, which are a complex interaction between people's social and spatial locations and local weather and non-weather events and processes. Their priorities are to protect livelihoods through resilience-building actions, which address proximate causes of vulnerability (improving coastal embankments, rehabilitating and strengthening homesteads, protecting agricultural land). Government support is limited to traditional development interventions that assist some more than others and often disconnected from local people's priorities. Most adaptation actions are practical measures within the prevailing politico-legal order. There is some evidence of more rights-based cooperative action between a national non-governmental organisation and local farmers that challenged aspects of that order.

Keywords:

• adaptation
• resilience
• NGOs
• weather

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the contribution of the Center for Natural Resource Studies, Bangladesh for making certain data available to us. They also thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided valuable comments on the paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The paper focuses on local people's understandings of weather as distinct from climate. Weather refers to atmospheric conditions at a particular time and place. In Bengali, CC translates as jalabayu paribartan, a phrase with which local people are unfamiliar. The term ‘weather’ is used throughout the paper except when a fuller discussion of CC is required.

2. The Ramsar List consists of internationally protected wetlands under the Ramsar Convention. The aim of the list is ‘to develop and maintain an international network of wetlands which are important for the conservation of global biological diversity and for sustaining human life through the maintenance of their ecosystem components, processes and benefits/services’ (http://www.ramsar.org/sites-countries/the-ramsar-sites).

3. Vulnerability means: The conditions determined by physical, social, economic and environmental factors or processes, which increase the susceptibility of a community to the impact of hazards (International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, 2004).

4. The core idea of EbA is to ensure the capacity of ecosystems to generate essential services for CC adaptation and requires ecosystems to be managed as components of a larger adaptation landscape of which human activities are a part (Devisscher, 2010).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by a Curtin University Strategic International Research Scholarship (CSIRS) granted to Rahman.