Quantifying community resilience to riverine hazards in Bangladesh

Every year, 30–70% of Bangladesh is inundated with flood waters, which combined with erosion, affect between 10 and 70 million people annually. Rural riverine communities in Bangladesh have long been identified as some of the poorest populations, most vulnerable to riverine hazards. However, these communities have, for generations, also developed resilience strategies – considered as the combination of absorptive, adaptive, and transformative approaches – to manage significant flooding and erosion. It is not clear whether such existing strategies are sufficient to generate resilience in the face of increasing hazards and growing pressures for land. In this study, we quantify community resilience to flooding and erosion of 35 of the most poverty-stricken and exposed communities in riverine Bangladesh by applying the…