Disaster Affected People’s Vulnerability Assessment Through Addressing Padma River Bank Erosion

Abstract

AbstractRajshahi, a divisional city of Bangladesh, is located on the bank of the Padma River. Peoples living in the riverbank areas face different types of natural hazards like floods, riverbank erosion, and draught. For the immediate years, riverbank erosion causes severe damages to the Char people who lived beside the city. So, this study focuses on identifying the erosion affected peoples’ vulnerability during flood and riverbank erosion. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were followed during the study. To identify the vulnerable condition of the people's several variables like damages of the resources, economic crisis, unemployment problem, food crisis, various diseases, and social problems were measured. The results show that riverbank erosion causes huge losses of land, houses, crops, and other assets of the residents every year. Besides they suffer from a short time severe food crisis, diseases, and unemployment problems as well. They get only a limited amount of help from the government and non-governmental organizations. They mainly get helps from relatives and kin-members. It is supposed government assistance does not often reach the vulnerable and affected groups due to the insincerity and dishonesty of the responsible authorities. As a result, during the disaster, they resettled themselves in the city either on the embankment or here and there. They also face various problems and City Corporation also failed to handle the problem properly. So, the researcher suggests some specific actions to prevent the rapid river erosion incident along with some other recommendations to reduce the vulnerability of the affected peoples.KeywordsRiverbank erosionVulnerability reductionAdaptationQualitative and quantitative research