Impacts of climatic disasters in the coastal area of Bangladesh: ‘Climate service’ a Way Forward

Abstract

This chapter considers ‘climate service’ as a tool to mitigate likely impacts of climatic disasters of the coastal regions in the southwest Bangladesh. Climate service enables to undertake the required development and capacity building for the coastal communities, who have the high potentiality of severe consequences of ecological disasters such as cyclones, flooding, sea levels rising and heat waves. The mitigation of adverse impacts of climatic disasters requires both comprehensive and appropriate plans and policies at national and regional level. In this chapter, we utilise life story interviews in the coastal area of Dacope sub-distrct under the division of Khulna, Bangladesh. The study analyses national and local development policies and plans to mitigate the impacts of climatic disasters in Bangladesh. Our study primarily explores the shortcomings of the national and local policies and plans to consider and apply climate service for mitigating the possible impacts of climate disasters. Our findings suggest that the current national and local development policies and plans insufficiently integrate climate service in undertaking the necessary developments and capacity building for risk reduction of climate disaster. Such inadequacies have significant impacts on the mitigation of the impacts of climate disaster. The outcome of the research will be instrumental for understanding and encouraging the stakeholders to integrate climate service in the national and local development policies and plans.