Constraints of pro-poor climate change adaptation in Chittagong city

Abstract

This paper considers how to make pro-poor climate change adaptation more effective in the city of Chittagong. Drawing on discussions with residents in informal settlements and interviews with staff from government agencies, NGOs and donors, it shows the lack of connection between the formal institutional structure for disaster preparedness and the groups most at risk from extreme weather disasters and their community level actions. There is no clear definition of roles among local government agencies with regard to climate change adaptation. Although there is a donor-funded programme to reduce poverty and disaster risks, this is not being implemented in the settlements most at risk from landslides. Neither are there any measures underway to address the needs of the residents in these high risk settlements, in part because of the financial weakness of local government. Nor is there much support for this from national government -since national climate change adaptation policy does not consider urban adaptation and strengthening urban government capacity to reduce the vulnerability of the extreme poor as a priority. NGOs undertake programmes for community-based disaster risk reduction but their scale and scope are limited by not being integrated into local government.

A Region at Risk:

“…Furthermore, nongovernment organizations that promote communitybased disaster risk reduction are largely not supported by local governments, nor is their knowledge integrated into decision-making processes (Ahammad 2011).…”

Climate Change Impacts in Agricultural Communities in Rural Areas of Coastal Bangladesh: A Tale of Many Stories

“…However, these documents offer very dispersed and insignificant contributions to adaptive capacity and resilience building for local communities. For example, NAPA is a highly project-oriented document that mainly shows priority areas of concern and recommended projects which basically lack the comprehensiveness required to strengthen adaptive capacity at the community level [85,86]. BCCSAP is more of a strategic document.…”

Developing adaptive capacity in times of climate change in central rural Vietnam: exploring smallholders’ learning and governance

“…Our findings contribute to the ongoing debates about the pros and cons of institutional hierarchies (McNeeley, 2012) or complex and inflexible institutional frameworks (Craig, 2010) which are said to reduce adaptive capacity and exacerbate vulnerability to climate change (Ahammad, 2011).…”

“…In addition, most existing frameworks and approaches for analysing climate change adaptation governance in hierarchical systems focus solely on barriers and therefore it is difficult to identify the potential of a governance system's overall capability to govern climate change (Ahammad, 2011;AntwiAgyei et al, 2015;Kithiia, 2011;Koch et al, 2007;Lebel et al, 2011). So far, no policy capacity studies have looked at the policy capacity for climate change adaptation in developing countries.…”

“…Arguably, the most frequently reported constraint in low-income countries is the lack of governmental funding for designing and implementing adaptation measures as well as for hiring appropriate personal resources (Antwi-Agyei et al, 2015). Moreover, limited access to domestic and international financial resources were found to negatively influence analysis and implementation of adaptation, for instance in Ghana (Antwi-Agyei et al, 2015) and Bangladesh (Ahammad, 2011).…”