Indigenous Knowledge Practices for Climate Change Adaptation in the Southern Coast of Bangladesh

Climate change is an extremely crucial issue for Bangladesh and according to the Global Climate Risk Index, the country ranks first as the nation most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change in the coming decades. Coping with climatic events like drought, cyclones and flooding is not new to Bangladesh. However, in recent times, focus has been shifted on community-based adaptation practices in understanding and addressing modern drivers, such as climate change and their impacts on local populations and their own adaptation practice. This paper attempts to use data collected from two coastal upazilas (sub-districts) in the southern coast of Bangladesh to look into the types of livelihoods, which provide us with a wider picture on what households do—and what they could do—to adapt to climate change in the coastal zone using their own knowledge generated through inter-generational community interaction. This case tries to open up the black box of ‘vulnerability' and map out differential adaptation strategies according to varying levels of resource access, livelihood strategies, and perception of risk. The aim is to incorporate self-assessments of community people with scientific descriptions of exposure to hazards and available resources to cope. The idea behind this new approach is to match experts' assessments of adaptive capacity with a self-evaluation of the target populations on what can actually be done to adapt to ongoing processes (in addition to the continuing effort to improve livelihoods). This papers argues that community knowledge continuously enriches the household adaptive capacity in a constantly changing climatic situation