Assessing sensitivity to climate-related disasters in the context of a developing country: Evidence from the coastal region of Bangladesh

Climate-related disasters have become a major threat to human civilization. Since many climatic hazards cannot be prevented, recognizing the underlying factors that render societies more vulnerable might facilitate pragmatic measures for minimizing the likelihood of disasters. With this impulse, the current study developed an innovative framework for appraising various societal attributes, the interplay of which potentially adds to the vulnerabilities of the coastal region of Bangladesh. In our study, we harnessed the notion of sensitivity used in disaster discourse and proposed five major domains of sensitivity namely demographic setback, inadequacy of basic resources, economic marginality, socio-cultural impediments and fragility of policy and governance, based on the conceptual adaptation of the prior social vulnerability frameworks. A total of thirty-five context-specific variables…