A Tale from Climate Zero: Climate Change, Land and People in Bangladesh

Bangladesh, one of the developing countries, is striving to graduate as a Middle Income Country by 2021 and is ranked as a Lower Middle Income Country recently by World Bank 1 . It is one of the top five populated nations in coastal low-lying areas that are developing and newly industrialized countries 2 . The poverty level of the country has been decreased from 59% in 1991 to 25.6% in 2014 3 . The population growth rate has declined from 2.9% per annum in 1974 to 1.2% in 2011 and the economy has grown at around 6% in last 10 years 4 . But still, more than 38.4 million people live in poverty. Many of them live in remote or ecologically fragile areas, such as river islets, flood-prone northern zone and cyclone-prone coastal belts, which are especially vulnerable to natural disasters. The government is formulating Seventh Five Year Plan (2015/16-2020/21) with broad principles of ensuring climate resilience through faster rate of poverty reduction taking climate vulnerabilities into account. Climate Change severely challenges the country's ability to achieve the high rates of economic growth that is needed for poverty reductions. It is predicted that frequent and severe floods, cyclones, storm surges and droughts will be increasingly to disrupt the life of the nation and the economy 5 . Bangladesh is bound to spend about $1.0 billion per year, which is more than 1% of its GDP to fight the impacts of climate change directly or indirectly 6 . Only cyclones cost the country over USD $25.0 billion 7. Supporting coastal people to adapt with the changed climate will pose further impacts on economic development.