The projects is building on RDRS' long experience from disaster response, -risk reduction and -mitigation, as well as the newest available information and data on how global climate changes will affect the vulnerable country which is cornered in by the Himalayas, India and the Bay of Bengal. RDRS will scale up the project in 2009 with NCA as the lead agency and with additional support from ACT sister agencies from Finn Church Aid and Church of Sweden.
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| Plint-raising: House built on a platform to withstand flood. |
Climate Change in Bangladesh
Bangladesh will be one of the countries that will experience the strongest impacts from climate change. The range of effects and the severity of changes that will occur in Bangladesh will include: average weather temperature rising; more extreme hot and cold spells; rainfall being less when it is most needed for agriculture, yet more in the monsoon when it already causes floods; melting of glaciers in the watersheds of Bangladesh’s rivers altering the hydrological cycle; more powerful tornados and cyclones; and sea level rise displacing communities, turning farmlands and drinking water saline. The impacts of climate change will be intensified by the fact that Bangladesh is both one of the most populated and one of the poorest nations on earth.
Climate Change Adaptation
‘Climate Change Adaptation’ is the process through which people reduce the negative effects of climate on their health and well-being. There are a number of basic strategies that can be taken in response to climate change. Most important is that adaptation starts with the local community and its adaptive capabilities are vital especially because climate change adaptation is context specific. Mainstreaming climate change adaptation into development thinking and practices has also been recommended as a priority and there are already many innovative projects in Bangladesh and around the world addressing the growing impacts of climate change on local communities. There is a need for technology transfer, duplication of other well functioning adaptation measures around the world and the invention of new measures and strategies in the country itself.
In Bangladesh, the National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPA) as recommended by the UN was endorsed in November 2005, but has so far only resulted in meetings, seminars, conferences and workshops in Dhaka and at international levels outside Bangladesh. Unfortunately, only a few adaptation projects have started in the rural areas since the NAPA was endorsed.
Projects
In 2008, NCA and its core partner RDRS mutually planned and started one of the first major climate change adaptation projects in Northern Bangladesh. It is a rather ambitious project containing three main components: a) Improving community coping capacity; b) Physical mitigation/preparedness and c) Improving food security for climate change affected and most vulnerable families.
The basic idea is to build on RDRS’ existing experience within disaster risk reduction and sustainable livelihood promotion and to combine these into relevant climate change adaptation activities. Climate change measures don’t necessarily have to be something new. In this case it is about improving and strengthening existing activities to make them durable to increased pressure from climatic change. They are very concrete and relevant measures that are extremely helpful for the vulnerable communities in the Char areas – the Bangladeshi name for a mobile sandbank in the river system - e.g. plinth raising, homestead gardening, elevations of water pumps (meaning that the height of a house/homestead, garden, water pump and compost pit is height adjusted or built up to sustain a flood), village disaster management committees, rice seed banks, short-duration-rice production and rice cultivation with fish as pest control.
Effective Cooperation
In October, representatives from Church of Sweden and Finn Church Aid visited the village Kaunia on one of the many Chars to see some of the adaptation activities that RDRS and NCA started in 2008. Previously, RDRS and Finn Church Aid plus Dan Church Aid were also planning a similar project, but with more focus on risk reduction. Dan Church Aid just managed to get funding from European Union for such a project with RDRS.
Knowing that focus on climate change related activities for Bangladesh will increase in the future, RDRS and the major ACT sister agencies has discussed how the ongoing adaptation project that NCA has funded in 2008 slowly can be scaled up, and at the same time how we can harmonize and combine our mutual resources into one larger programme in 2009. This will make life easier for RDRS and the agencies – but it is also to share lessons learned and best practices.
NCA has been elected as lead agency for that process and Church of Sweden and Finn Church Aid will channel their funds through NCA, which will be responsible for technical support and advice, joint monitoring and reporting.
Since the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005 , all ACT sister agencies have tried to improve harmonization initiatives, alignment and thus also impact. Besides improving the communities’ coping mechanisms on a much larger scale, the joint ambition is certainly also to make the aid even more effective.
For more information, please contact:
- Steffen Rasmussen, regional representative in Sri Lanka, e-mail:
, Tel: +94 11 250 2441
- Claes Book, environmental advisor, e-mail:
, Tel: +47 464 42 108