Climate Change, Natural Disaster and Vulnerability to Land Displacement in Coastal Region of Bangladesh

Copyright © 2014 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ABSTRACT: The climate change is a frequent feature accompanied by chronology of major disaster in the coastal areas of Bangladesh. Particularly coastal and offshore areas of Bangladesh are widely vulnerable to natural disasters due to its geographical location and very high population density. This paper attempted to study the land displacement pattern and possible vulnerability faced by internally displaced persons in the pace of natural disasters, and to identify the interrelated aspects of possible socioeconomic impacts of tropical cyclone, storm surge, river erosion, flood and drought on the coastal inhabitants. The study concentrated on the recent five environmental disasters. Sample survey into the selected costal region was undertaken to obtain data on land use, settlement and displacement pattern. Focus group discussion (FGD) was also undertaken to understand the vulnerability to short-term hazards, in particular, tropical SIDR and AILA impacts. SPSS 16 and ATLAS.ti were used to analyze data. The study found that the rate of landless households increased alarmingly due to frequent disasters which significantly caused the declining availability of land. Similarly the number of petty land owners increased significantly, while the hand medium and high land owners decreased over the years. It also found that frequent disasters in every year compelled the farmers to sell their land consistently because these displaced lands became unusable due to its excessive salinity and long time water logging. Consequently life, livelihood and occupation of these vulnerabl