Understanding Livelihood Resilience in Bangladesh: The multifaceted infuences of environmental shocks and climate change impacts on people’s lives

Abstract

A climate-resilient and sustainable future for people in vulnerable countries starts with resilient livelihoods. There is an urgent need to turn knowledge around livelihood threats, shocks, trajectories and opportunities into operable solutions. This factsheet presents the key findings coming out of Gibika, a five-year research-to-action project, advancing the understanding of people’s responses to climatic changes and environmental stress in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a country with a wide variety of environmental stressors. The fact that people are struggling with different stressors in different regions also makes their needs and responses very diverse. Clear differences were observed between the northern, central and southern study sites. For example, in the northern study sites people were facing drought and shifting rainy seasons, while in the southern and central study sites people were dealing with stressors such as riverbank erosion, cyclones and floods. In the southern and central study sites people described struggling more with the environmental impacts than in the northern study sites, and they found themselves and their livelihoods failing to cope with the stress. This factsheet presents six key conclusions, as well as voices from the people which we hope will guide and support policy makers and practitioners in their work to better protect the most vulnerable from climatic risks.