Coastal Zone Vulnerability and Climate Change: Visible and Not-So-Visible Threats

Worldwide, densely populated coastal areas continue to grow in both numbers of people and levels of economic activity. Yet, climate change directly threatens the lives and livelihoods of inhabitants of low-lying coastal regions. The impacts of sea-level rise, increasing soil and water salinity, extreme rainfall events and intensified storm surges risks are already damaging, and these risks will continue to grow in the coming decades.  

Along with more obvious signs of these risks, such as damage to coastal infrastructure from cyclones and flooding of cities from intense rainfall, there are less visible but no less serious threats to the goals of ending poverty and promoting shared prosperity, such as increasing soil and water salinity. Bangladesh is an extremely useful case study for identifying and measuring these worldwide threats as the families in coastal Bangladesh are already on the “front line” of climate change and how families in coastal Bangladesh adapt foretells future decisions by hundreds of millions of families worldwide that will face similar threats by 2100.

In this presentation, seven years of multidisciplinary research on climate change impacts, livelihood threats, and adaptation possibilities for the inhabitants of coastal Bangladesh will be summarised.