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Floating gardening is a form of hydroponics or soil-less culture. It is an age-old practice of crop cultivation in the floodplains of southern Bangladesh, where aquatic plants such as water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) are used to construct floating platforms on which seedlings are raised and vegetables and other crops cultivated in the rainy season. The platform residue is used in the preparation of beds for winter vegetable gardening. Floating gardening was introduced in 2006 on a pilot-scale in the north-east wetlands of the country, as a contribution to food security and as a supplementary income for the marginalized community. The overall experience of floating cultivation in three selected villages was encouraging. Local people became aware of this new farming system and their level of knowledge improved. Communities were mobilized into groups to make floating platforms, and platform residues were later used to establish winter gardens. Cultivation was successful on both types of plot, and vegetables were both consumed by the producers and sold in the market. The input–output analysis revealed floating gardening to be a feasible alternative livelihood option for the wetland dwellers. The method provided targeted landless people with parcels of land in the monsoon, enabling them to grow vegetables. Floating gardening and associated winter gardening appear to have the potential for introduction to other parts of the world where aquatic weed management is a major problem.

The unusual situation that arose due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 65-day fishing ban (national policy to boost depleted fish stocks) affected the lower-income fishing communities in coastal Bangladesh. Shocks and stresses were posed, and community people adopted strategies to adapt to the changes. In the process of adaptation, social-ecological systems resilience at different levels plays a crucial role. Though resilience is acknowledged as multilevel feature, studies on the interaction between the levels while understanding communities’ responses to shock and stress are limited. Thus, in this study, we explored the shocks and stresses the fishing community faced and their views on the resilience feature at different levels (i.e., individual, household, and community level) in coastal Bangladesh during the COVID-19 pandemic and 65-day fishing ban period. The study found that the most resilience promoting features (e.g., diversified livelihood, friendship, and network of supports) were adopted at the individual and household levels. However, positive and negative interactions were explored between resilience features at all levels. Low community-level resilience was not translated into a lack of household-level resilience, and strong individual-level resilience did not mean high household-level resilience. It was noted that the increased resilience of a particular individual or household could negatively affect community resilience. Resilience features showed inconsistent interactions within or among the three levels’ resilience features. The study also revealed that multilevel resilience features stressed the importance of combining persistence (i.e., keeping fishing as the main livelihood) and adaptation process (e.g., livelihood diversification). The study showcases the importance of considering multilevel resilience that offers insight into crucial resilience factors which would not be evident if only one level were studied. The overall finding of this study will contribute to framing governance strategies to ensure sustainable coastal management even in the time of any abrupt or expected changes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the fishing ban policy.

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