NSF-NFRF: Building resilience of coastal inhabitants in vulnerable regions of Bangladesh through a participatory, gender-transformative approach

Bangladesh places seventh on the global Climate Risk Index and the country’s coastal areas are particularly vulnerable to the changing climate. Women, members of Indigenous communities, and people with disabilities in particular face high risks and vulnerabilities due to their lack of adaptive capacity, resources, and skills. The research takes a novel approach to evidence generation within the field of climate change adaptation and mitigation by utilizing a gender-transformative and participatory approach to identify risks and create transformational mitigation/adaptation strategies for climate change risks. In the past, approaches for addressing climate change and its risk and vulnerability assessment focused mainly on the scientific and technical aspects of the problems while ignoring social, institutional, and gender issues. This research project overcomes this gap and promotes the progress of science by prioritizing partnerships with local vulnerable communities to co-create knowledge and communication strategies, and to plan and implement objectives that are devised and owned by communities and local governments to build climate change resilience. The broader scientific impact of the research is anticipated to be a demonstration that groups that are most at risk of the negative impacts of climate change are in a unique position to lead adaptation and mitigation efforts – which both can decrease their risk of experiencing negative consequences from climate change as well as can help empower them to provide ongoing leadership on this complex and ever-evolving issue within their own communities. The objective of the research is to reduce risks associated with climate change affecting vulnerable coastal communities in the Cox’s Bazar and Chittagong regions of Bangladesh, while contributing to gender transformative change. This will be achieved in three phases. First, working together with community-based women, representatives of Indigenous populations and persons with disabilities who reside in highly climate insecure communities in coastal areas of Bangladesh, the research team and a women-led, community-based organization will use innovative and participatory visual and arts-based methodologies, such as storytelling, photovoice, incomplete stories, mapping and drawing, to collaboratively identify risks that these groups encounter due to climate change. In phase 2, the research team will support community representatives to analyze data collected in phase 1 and to create feasible, locally-led, community-based action plans that can be piloted in their own communities to adapt to / mitigate the impacts of climate change. In phase 3, the research will focus on analyzing the data collected throughout the implementation of the locally-developed community-action plans, synthesizing learning, and developing dissemination products. This is a project jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as funding agencies from Canada via the 2023 International Joint Initiative for Research on Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Competition. This Competition allowed a single joint international proposal to be submitted and peer-reviewed by Canada. Upon successful joint determination of an award recommendation, each agency funds the proportion of the budget that supports scientists at institutions in their respective countries. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.