Research Article | OPEN ACCESS
Livelihood Coping and Recovery from Disaster: The Case of Coastal Bangladesh
Md. Masud-All-Kamal
Department of Sociology, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh
Current Research Journal of Social Sciences 2013 1:35-44
Received: November 27, 2012 | Accepted: January 07, 2013 | Published: January 25, 2013
Abstract
Bangladesh has a long history of coping with and recovery from disasters. Although climate extremes are increasingly taking huge tolls especially in the southwestern part of the country, households are resisting the negative outcomes of these events eventually. This research explores the livelihood coping and recovery strategies of the people of a coastal village in the wake of a cyclone, Aila. The vulnerability approach to disaster is adopted as theoretical framework of the research, in which disaster is considered as hazards affecting vulnerable people. Using semi-structured interviews and observations, the coping strategies of a cyclone affected village community are examined. The study finds that people’s livelihood coping and recovery largely depend on the indigenous knowledge. Results show that households followed diverse strategies such as livelihood diversification, informal risk sharing within the community and migration in response to the cyclone Aila. The study also addresses the role of local government, civil society organizations and communities and finds that these actors hardly addressed the root causes of vulnerability.
Keywords:
Adaptive capacity, community, cyclone Aila, resilience, Sundarbans, vulnerability,
Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests.
Open Access Policy
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Copyright
The authors have no competing interests.
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ISSN (Online): 2041-3246
ISSN (Print): 2041-3238 |
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