Abstract
The short- and long-term impacts from natural hazards, which are thought to be the consequences of climate change, interrupt the functions of the social-ecological system of the Sundarbans Mangrove Forest (SMF) in Bangladesh, which in turn affect the livelihood of people at risk. In the absence of sustainable livelihood options, over time these people have become more dependent on the resources of the Sundarbans. This study investigates how their livelihood strategies affect the dependency pattern on the common resources of this mangrove forest during economic depressions that resulted from disasters caused by extreme climatic events. The focus of this investigation is on a sub-district known as Koyra, located in southwestern coastal Bangladesh, which has the longest border with the Sundarbans. Relevant parameters such as climatic trends and extreme events, financial-physical-structural damage patterns, socioeconomic peculiarities, changes in consumption expenditure, asset portfolio, and occupation patterns are considered. Data are collected from 420 households through face-to-face questionnaires and seven focus group discussions (FGDs). The empirical results suggest that the higher intensity and frequency of natural hazards have led to substantially higher damages of asset and capital goods. Over the last two decades, around 8 % of the sampled households have become landless; more than 25 % have switched from crops to other nonagricultural occupations; and more than 26 % have started depending on forest resources for their consumption smoothing. In addition, each household has incurred annual disaster damages of on average US$ 177. Combined with the absence of well-defined property rights, the people at risk have become more dependent on resources from the SMF for their livelihoods as well as consumption smoothing, which eventually is likely to jeopardize the stock of renewable resources of this forest. We recommend redefining property rights to ensure a win-win platform for all the stakeholders.
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Notes
- 1.
Lowest tier of the local government in Bangladesh.
- 2.
Clusters.
- 3.
Goods such as honey, wax, wood logs, and nipa palm are collected and sold.
- 4.
Social elites are mainly comprised of community people with political power (e.g., village chairman and political leaders).
- 5.
The poverty line was calculated in 2005 (accordingly adjusted for 2008–2009) by applying the cost of basic need (CBN) consumption as a poverty threshold value, which was US$ 202/capita/year in 2008–2009 (BBS 2005, 2010, 2011). The CBN consumption consists of both food and nonfood items required for maintaining a minimum living standard.
- 6.
The Regional Specialized Meteorological Centre for South Asia defines very severe cyclonic storms as having wind speeds of over 168 km/h (RSMC 2013). Storms with this wind speed are considered as category 3 storms according to the Saffir-Simpson scale used by US-based RSMCs.
- 7.
Excluding transfer of the landownership to cope with ex post hazard shocks.
- 8.
This implies the power of a repetitive measure design. We divided the entire sample into two groups (poor and non-poor) where “systematically” refers to the effect size (i.e., power) of the repetitive measure, which is shown by point-biserial (r) where 0.2, 0.5, and 0.8 refer to small, but not trivial, medium, and high effect size, respectively. For a detailed explanation, see Field (2005).
- 9.
In explaining the log-linear coefficients from Table 9.5, “(eβ – 1) × 100” is applied where β refers to the concerned regression coefficient.
Table 9.5 Regression results
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Ahsan, M.N., Vink, K., Takeuchi, K. (2017). Livelihood Strategies and Resource Dependency Nexus in the Sundarbans. In: DasGupta, R., Shaw, R. (eds) Participatory Mangrove Management in a Changing Climate. Disaster Risk Reduction. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-56481-2_9
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