Abstract
Natural disasters cause immense damage to a country’s economy and society; it is therefore crucial that most countries have policies for effective disaster management. Bangladesh, in particular, has long been considered as one of the most disaster-vulnerable countries in the world. Due to the climatic and geographic conditions, poor disaster management infrastructure, poor governance, and high population density, Bangladesh is exposed to a high risk of natural disasters, such as tropical cyclones, floods, land erosion, water logging, drought, a rising sea level, arsenic contamination of ground water, and earthquakes. In the 1970s, Bangladesh had the highest number of disaster victims among neighboring countries. More recently, however, due to the development of disaster management programs, the country has had remarkable success in reducing the number of victims (GoB 2008; Mallick et al. 2011a). In fact, while the cyclones in 1970 and 1991 saw a loss of 250,000 and 140,000 lives, respectively, the death toll from cyclone Sidr in 2007 was 3363.
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Notes
- 1.
The statistics are based on those from the Department of Disaster Management. The Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters reports the number of victims as being 300,000 in 1970, 140,000 in 1991, and 4,234 in 2007.
- 2.
Source: EM-DAT.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
The scale of cyclone is defined on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane intensity scale.
- 6.
The statistics are based on those of the Department of Disaster Management. However, Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters reports that the victims in this cyclone were 4234.
- 7.
Department of Disaster Management, http://www.dmb.gov.bd/pastdisaster, accessed on April 18, 2014.
- 8.
Statistics obtained from the Department of Disaster Management, available at http://www.dmb.gov.bd/pastdisaster, accessed on April 18, 2014.
- 9.
Although the government also provides a wide variety of disaster management programs, such as Vulnerable Group Feeding (VGF), this study focuses on the programs that are directly related to the reduction of human loss.
- 10.
The shelter for livestock is on the ground floor so that animals can easily approach it by walking up a slope.
- 11.
This program was established in 1972 under an agreement between the Bangladesh Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief, and the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society (Paul and Dutt 2010).
- 12.
CPP Volunteer Database. See http://www.cpp.gov.bd, accessed on June 30th, 2016.
- 13.
While the survey was conducted only once in December 2010, we retrospectively asked these questions in relation to the periods both before and after the cyclone. Given the possibility of reverse causality, that is, the experience of evacuation affects the social capital, we use the social capital measures at the pre-cyclone period.
- 14.
We control for a host of variables (such as religion, employment status, land holding, livestock holding, duration of settlement in years, age and education of household head, number of male, female and children in the household, level of inundation at home, level of inundation at the working place, number of people to share information at working place, if warning received by microphone, distance to shelter, quality of road to shelter) when estimating the MNL model of evacuation choice. The detail estimation results are not reported in the chapter but are available from the authors upon request.
- 15.
Since access to CPP is not random, we also conducted the propensity score matching estimation to evaluate the impact of CPP on the evacuation. The result is qualitatively the same.
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Shoji, M., Murata, A. (2018). Challenges in Reducing the Number of Disaster Victims in Bangladesh. In: Sawada, Y., Mahmud, M., Kitano, N. (eds) Economic and Social Development of Bangladesh. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63838-6_13
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