Coastal vulnerability assessment of Meghna estuary of Bangladesh using integrated geospatial techniques

Abstract Bangladesh is one of the most geomorphologically active countries situated within the World's largest basin of the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna (GBM). The physiographic settings of the southward coastal areas of Bangladesh is completely exposed to the sea posing vulnerability to natural hazards whereas the poor socio-economic condition tends to intensify the impacts of the vulnerability. In addition to that, the contemporary climate change induced vulnerabilities place the coast of Bangladesh as one of the highly affected areas. Therefore, to combat the vulnerabilities to strengthen the resilience of the coastal communities, spatio-temporal dimension of the vulnerability needs to be understood. The study applied RS and GIS techniques with appropriate methodology along with field and secondary data to constitute coastal vulnerability index (CVI) to identify priority intervention areas along the Meghna estuarine coast of Bangladesh which is the first study on Meghna estuary in this kind. The integrated geospatial techniques have been applied to 2470 grids along the Meghna estuarine coast for each of the 9 parameters to rank in a 1 to 5 vulnerability scale. Finally, the cumulative score of ranks of all the parameters have also been scaled to get CVI which shows significant effectiveness in identifying areas (administrative units) with vulnerability intensity. The authors believe that this CVI can be very important decision support tool for the policy makers to sustainably manage the Meghna estuarine coast.