Community and institutional responses to the challenges facing poor urban people in Khulna, Bangladesh in an era of climate change

Abstract

Poor urban people in Bangladesh are already experiencing numerous climate-related problems because of their multiple forms of vulnerability and multiple sources of deprivation. Their problems differ greatly, both within and across settlements and cities, and so do the practices by which they are trying to tackle them. Various factors – physical, tenure-related, socio-political and institutional – contribute to this great variety of problems and practices. In this paper, the authors focus on Khulna City to identify the challenges facing Khulna’s poor people, understand the practices they are developing, and examine the role that institutions are playing in supporting/constraining these practices. Khulna is third largest city of Bangladesh, located in the southwest region, where the consequences of climate change are expected to be particularly severe. They examined two of the most common forms of settlement – a public and a private settlement