Women in Bangladesh face disproportionate risks from disasters and climate change impacts. The gendered division of labor means that coping with disasters falls heavily on women's shoulders. Women suffer more from issues like poverty, hunger, and health problems during disasters. They have less secure access to relief efforts, shelter, and face higher risks of violence. Vulnerable groups like female-headed households, the poor, and fishing communities will be severely affected by losing land, housing and livelihoods from climate change impacts like rising seas and salinity.

2. Risks for Women
• Disasters affect both women and men but the burden of
coping with disaster falls heavily on women’s shoulders
in Bangladesh
• Women suffer more than men from poverty, hunger,
malnutrition, economic crises, environmental
degradation, health related problems, insecurity and
become victim of violence and political crises

3. Risks for women
• The gendered division of labour becomes critical as
gender roles are often re-enforced and even intensified –
due to the additional work and changes in environment
brought on by a disaster
• Violation of women’s rights becomes more prominent
during disaster
• Relief do not reach to those people who mostly need it
• Women’s own initiatives become crucial for their family
survival

4. Risks for female-headed Households, vulnerable
& destitute
• Extremely poor female headed households
will suffer most from climate change
• Similarly the disadvantaged group of people
like poor, vulnerable and destitute will suffer
from climate change

5. Gender dimension of Disaster
• Women and men experience disasters differently due to their
gendered social construction
• Consequently, disasters also impact differently on men and women
• Women continuously feel insecure and face violence in the flood
refuge/shelter or home
• Women contribute more than men
• Women and men’s roles in the disaster management process are
different

6. DISASTER AND WOMEN’s vulnerability
• Women are not owners of land, the most
important asset in rural Bangladesh. The law of
inheritance in Bangladesh is complex. Although
daughters do have inheritance rights, they do not
have equal right.

7. Poor people’s Risks related to warning, shelter and relief
• warning, shelter construction and disaster relief. This
system relies heavily on the grassroots support system.
• But the real fact is that the number of cyclone center is
very few to ensure shelter to the increasingly population,
moreover in many places structures, itself is vulnerable to
natural disaster.

8. Risks of Fishing families
• People living on the river islands (chars) and along
the coastline especially the fishing families, will be
seriously affected due to loose their lands, houses
and occupations.

9. Poor people’s Risks related to information
sharing
• Information about climate change related issues is
scattered and sometimes difficult to access. Local
media men, journalist, electronic media people
have little/no access to climate change
information.

10. Poor people’s Risks related to Health
• Human health is also at risk from growing
incidence of diseases linked to rising temperatures
and rainfall variability. Effects may range from
diarrheal diseases to increased malnutrition.

11. Risks: Rising Salinity
• Rising salinity in the coastal belt are likely to
reduce crop yields and crop production.
• Increasingly saline drinking water may result acute
health hazards
• May displace hundreds of thousands of people

12. Poor people’s Risks: Shortage of pure
drinking water
• Disaster impose hardship on women and
children, who are responsible in collecting
drinking water for their families.

13. Poor People’s Risks: Restriction in mobility, insecurity,
crime, violence
• restricted mobility (particularly women) and increased
insecurity.
• criminalization of politics, corruption, violation of citizen’s
right, breakdown of traditional moral order
• and intolerant political culture may attribute to
weakening of good governance

14. Risks: Lack of Capacity Building
• There is a co- relation between capability and risk.
• The more the Capacity the Less the Vulnerability.
• Thus, Effective Capacity Building, Less Risk.
• The Lees the Capacity, the More the Vulnerability, thus,
High risk

15. Risks: Loss/lack of Entitlements
• Loss of standing crops
• Loss/damage of livestock/dairy/poultry/fisheries
• Loss of trees/fruits
• Loss/damage of vegetable garden
• Loss of income
• Unemployed

16. Risks: water-borne & air-borne
diseases
• Natural disasters likely to increase the incidence of
water-borne and air-borne diseases.
• May aggravate in spreading bacteria, parasites and
disease vectors breed faster due to warmer and
wetter conditions.

17. Risks: Disruption of Social net-
work
• The immediate disruption of social net-work make
poor, destitute, vulnerable, disable, elderly people,
women and children may make these people more
distressed and helpless.

18. Risks: Immediate supply of food, shelter
and logistics
• It may be quite challenging for affected persons to
have food, shelter and logistics.
• Moreover, disruption of communication,
transportation and infrastructure may pose serious
challenge in coping with vulnerability.

19. Response to Disasters
• The Forest ecosystems of Bangladesh is quite supportive & adaptive
to climate variability.
• The complex interactions of multiple organisms ranging from trees,
animals to micro-organisms protect the climatically sustainability.
• Very often the presence of functional groups and response diversity
(i.e., diversity of responses to environmental change among species
that contribute to the same ecosystem function) of species within
the forests determine the adaptive capacity to the impacts
• Of climate change.