Information on climate change impacts on agricultural communities in the southwestern coastal region of Bangladesh were collected from members of six communities through a participatory approach. A “micro level” case study approach was used. As advised by Moser and Stein, a participatory approach was adopted in the field investigation to provide insights into the experience of the impacts of extreme weather events among low-income groups in a way that macro-level analysis cannot do. The Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) as “an approach and a range of methods for learning about rural life and conditions from, with and by rural people” method was used. PRA provides comparative advantages over conventional questionnaire-based studies as it enables “people to express, enhance, share and analyze their knowledge” and its different tools such as transect, livelihood analysis, in-depth interview, Focus Group Discussion (FGD), seasonal analysis, trend analysis, and resource mapping is extensively used for analyzing vulnerability of rural communities. This research mostly used FGD, risk and resource mapping (RRM), vulnerability assessment (VA), and timeline analysis tools for primary data collection. The selection of data collection tools were influenced by the earlier environmental and land use vulnerability studies in the same region e.g., Hasan and Roe who used wide range of PRA tools.
The field studies were conducted between 2009 and 2011. In July 2009, a week long field-testing of the methods in a village called “Shiali” revealed that three methods such as (i) semi–structured FGD; (ii) seasonal calendar; and (iii) historical transect were able to generate comprehensive community views and information for analysis. VA and RRM were extensively used as part of the FGD process to collect information on local resources, resource vulnerability, and vulnerability orders, which were not always possible to realize through the use of other research methods.
Group discussions (15–20 participants) were held in each of the six agricultural communities. Discussions started with a brief presentation explaining the research purpose and the expectations from the group to identify their vulnerability to climate change considering communities’ resources, capacities, environmental changes, degradation, and evidences of extreme climate events. The groups were asked to identify their social, economic, natural, human, and physical vulnerabilities to extreme climatic events. In a subsequent stage, the groups were asked to rank the vulnerabilities according to their order of occurrence. Participants also drew connections between different impacts on different orders of occurrence and this showed how the different orders interacted with each other. Finally, the different orders were clustered as first, second, and third order vulnerabilities of climate change impacts.
The authors also used risk and resource mapping (RRM) to collect information on land, water, crops and other local resources (resource mapping) and on climatic risks on significant local resources (risk mapping). RRM was carried out with the same group of participants. The groups were asked to produce their community (village) maps showing major resources. In combination with other tools such as the seasonal calendar (trend of agricultural production in different seasons of the year) and historical transect (timeline of the key disaster events), the RRM exercises were done in a retrospective manner and coincided with the historical transect analysis, which also depicted the changes of resources e.g., increase or decrease that occurred over time. The process also made it possible to simulate future changes taking into account the current social, economic and environmental factors. The results of the process were plotted from 1990 to the survey year 2010/11 and projected to the year 2020. Another PRA method called a pie diagram was used to draw the communities’ quantitative perceptions on different issues. This method involves a graphical presentation of data and information to allow comparison of sizes, amounts, quantities, and proportions. It is mostly used to help the local people to arrive at quantitative conclusions. It was used as a complementary research tool to facilitate discussions on special issues like food security.
Study Location: As has already been mentioned, the paper focuses on six southwestern coastal communities of Bangladesh. Six villages of southwest Khulna District were selected as the study location because they are very representative of coastal agricultural communities. The area is characterized by a rapidly growing population 70 percent of which is directly dependent on small-scale agriculture. The communities belong to the same administrative zone (Union; a small local government sub-division) situated in the Low Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ) of the country. LECZ could be defined as of areas with a coastline up to a 10-meter sea level elevation. The names of the communities are: (a) Pithaboag; (b) GoalbarirChar; (c) Doba; (d) Goara; (e) Putimari; and (f) Dhopokhola. Coastal areas of Bangladesh manifest different climatic and non-climatic vulnerabilities such as tropical cyclones, salinity intrusion, and endemic poverty. As part of the coastal region, the communities also endure frequent climatic disasters such as the tropical cyclones of 2007 and 2009 and flooding.