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Local Determinants of Adaptive Capacity Against the Climatic Impacts in Coastal Bangladesh

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Handbook of Climate Change Adaptation

Abstract

A growing body of literature came up with suggestion to enhance adaptive capacity of poor and marginalized population to build a resilient society against climatic disasters. Although many earlier qualitative works have indicated the factors that should be addressed to enhance such adaptive capacity, however very scanty of them quantitatively assessed the influences of those factors on various dimensions of people’s adaptive capacity. This chapter assesses quantitatively the influences of various demographic and socioeconomic, past adaptive behavioral, climate/weather information/knowledge products, and physical environmental (spatial/locational) factors on the adaptive capacity of coastal people against the livelihood insecurity that are caused by hydrometeorological events.

The empirical part of this research was conducted in three villages of Kalapara Upazila (subdistrict) located close to the shoreline of Bay of Bengal in southwest part of Bangladesh. A total of 285 respondents were randomly interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire in 2009. Respondents were asked to rate their adaptive capacity against 25 impacts that cause their livelihood insecure. The principal component analysis (PCA) technique was employed to identify the major dimensions of livelihood insecurity. Livelihood insecurities are related to (a) severe constraints in agriculture farming and allied activities; (b) severe damage of physical and socioeconomic infrastructures; (c) severe constraints in fishing (mostly offshore) related activities; and (d) severe crisis in freshwater supply and public health risk. How does adaptive capacity against each of these four dimensions of livelihood insecurity differ due to the influence of various factors is assessed by employing multiple analysis of variance (ANOVAs) technique.

The ANOVAs show that among the demographic and socioeconomic factors, sex, education, occupation, farmland holding, membership status (of social institution), and social capitals have the strongest influence on differential adaptive capacity in general. Similarly, among the past adaptive behavioral factors, except the freshwater crisis all other variables, namely, adaptation against flood, rainfall, and salinity intrusion have strong influence in making difference in adaptive capacity. Likewise, almost all climate/weather information/knowledge products have statistically significant influence on various dimensions of adaptive capacity. The policy implication is that while launching any program to enhance the adaptive capacity of coastal people against the threats of hydrometeorological disastrous events on their livelihood security, the identified factors need to be accounted.

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Acknowledgment

The authors acknowledge the research grant provided by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a part of Scholarship for doing Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) of the first and corresponding author at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Thailand, supervised by the second author. The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewer (s) for giving constructive comments. Finally, first author is thankful to the field surveyor team led by Papon and Shamim of URP discipline, Khulna University.

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  1. Urban and Rural Planning, and Development Studies Discipline, Khulna University, Khulna, 9208, Bangladesh

    Mustafa Saroar

  2. Regional and Rural Development Planning, and Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Management Program, School of Environment, Resources and Development (SERD), Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Pathumthani, Bangkok, 12120, Thailand

    Jayant K. Routray

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  1. Mustafa Saroar
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Correspondence to Mustafa Saroar .

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  1. Faculty of Life Sciences, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany

    Walter Leal Filho

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Saroar, M., Routray, J.K. (2015). Local Determinants of Adaptive Capacity Against the Climatic Impacts in Coastal Bangladesh. In: Leal Filho, W. (eds) Handbook of Climate Change Adaptation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38670-1_39

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