Residence and Job Location Change Choice Behavior under Flooding and Cyclone Impacts in Bangladesh

Abstract

Climate change enters significantly into and is shown to be a direct determinant of residence and job location change decisions. Understanding of how people’s residence and job location change choice behavior is affected and thus responds to the impacts of climate change is essential for transportation planners and adaptation decision makers. As an addition to the current literature, the main purposes of this paper are to investigate people’s residence and job location change choice behavior affected by factors at origin and look into the behavioral differences between coastal and inland people under flooding and cyclone scenarios in Bangladesh. Questionnaire data were surveyed in 14 coastal and inland cities of Bangladesh with an orthogonal design of three flooding/cyclone scenarios. The multinomial Logit model and cross-nested Logit model are proposed to address the above purposes. Results of this study indicate that flooding/cyclone factors and income, land owned, and number of family members significantly affects people’s location change choice. In addition, coastal people are also significantly affected by previous experience factors. Furthermore, road connection plays an important role when people choose to change residence locations in coastal areas. It is also found that if there are changes in flooding impacts, the inland people will first consider to change their job locations, while the coastal people would consider both job and residence location changes. Results of this work provide policy suggestions on transportation infrastructure investment, shelter planning and construction, and population migration under flood and cyclone impacts as a result of climate change.