Measuring Resilience of Coastal Fishing Communities of Bangladesh to Climatic Impacts

Measuring resilience to the impacts of climate change is essential to finding ways to help communities to adapt to climate change and to improve their livelihoods. This study has measured the resilience to the impacts of climate change of two coastal fishing communities of Bangladesh – at the village of Bolgram Sura in Bhola Sadar and the village of Chita Kundu at Manpura Upazila of Bhola district, using 52 attributes under six specific types of capital – natural, human, physical, social, financial, and institutional – where a lower attribute score represents a higher resilience. This study has found significant variation among the resilience scores under each of the six specific types of capital of Chita Kundu (p value = 0.037), but not among the types of capital of Bolgram Sura (p value = 0.312). Some specific attributes have shown a highly significant difference between the two communities, such as fish landing center (p value < 0.001), power supply (p value = 0.004) and number of children (p value = 0.005), and a significant difference in family thriftiness (p value = 0.024). Overall, this study has reported that the Bolgram Sura fishing community is a little bit more resilient (though without statistical significance) in four types of capital – natural, physical, financial and institutional – compared with the Chita Kundu counterparts. Two other types of capital – human and social – have shown the opposite results. This study has identified specific attributes and types of capital for policy intervention to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience of coastal fishing communities. In order to scale up, more such studies need to be conducted from different contexts.