Climate, Environmental Hazards and Migration in Bangladesh
Climate, Environmental Hazards and Migration in Bangladesh

Author: Max Martin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-20

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1315297434

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The apocalyptic visions of climate change that are projected in the media often involve extreme weather events, disasters and mass migration of poor people. This book takes a critical look at this notion, drawing on research in Bangladesh, a country located at the heart of debates on climate change and migration. This book argues that rather than leading to dramatic events, climatic and environmental impacts often cause incremental changes in people’s habitats and livelihoods, making them migrate in search of better places and income. With or without climate change, climatic and environmental factors can impoverish people, and drive displacement and migration, especially in the global South. These influences, including disasters, need not necessarily make people move, but instead sometimes trap the poorest and the most vulnerable people in their places exposed to hazards or make them migrate to even riskier places, such as crowded and flood-prone urban slums. This book argues that restrictions placed on people’s mobility options could increase their vulnerability and favours proactive migration policies. This timely contribution explains the climate-hazard-migration nexus in an accessible, engaging language for students of geography, development studies, politics and environmental studies, as well as humanitarian and development practitioners and policymakers.

Global Environmental Risk
Global Environmental Risk

Author: Jeanne X. Kasperson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-13

Total Pages: 586

ISBN-13: 1136533834

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Despite international initiatives such as the Earth Summit in 1992 and ongoing efforts to implement the Kyoto Protocol, human activities continue to register a destructive toll on the planetary environment. At root, research on global environmental risk seeks new pathways for reversing unsustainable trends, curtailing ongoing destructive activities, and creating a life-sustaining planet. This book takes stock of the distinctive challenges posed by global environmental risks, the capacity of knowledge systems to identify and characterize such risks, and the competence of human society to manage the unprecedented complexity. Particular attention trains on engaging, in ways conducive to enhancing social learning and adaptation, the large uncertainties inherent in these risks. Various chapters enlist different scales of analysis to explore the manifestation and causes of global environmental risks in all the diversity of their regional expression. Throughout, the editors and contributors accord prominence to the vulnerability of people and places to environmental degradation. Understanding vulnerability is a neglected key to assessing the nature of the risks and determining strategies for altering trajectories of threat. Global risk futures, the editors argue, are not intractable, and are still amenable to a risk-analysis enterprise that is democratic in principle, humanistic in concept, and geared to the realities that pertain to the particular societies, locales, and regions that will ultimately bear the risk.

Handbook of Waterfront Cities and Urbanism
Handbook of Waterfront Cities and Urbanism

Author: Mohammed Mahbubur Rahman

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-07-29

Total Pages: 643

ISBN-13: 1000588947

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Handbook of Waterfront Cities and Urbanism is the first resource to address cities’ transformations of their coastlines and riverbanks and the resulting effects on environment, culture, and identity in a genuinely global context. Spanning cities from Gdańsk to Georgetown, this reference for design, development, and planning explores the transition of waterfronts from industrial and port zones to crowd-drawing urban spectacles within the frameworks of urban development, economics, ecology, governance, globalization, preservation, and sustainability. A collection of contextual studies, local perspectives, project reviews, and analyses of evolution and emerging trends provides critical insight into the phenomenon of waterfront development and urbanism in cities from the East to the West. Features: Explores the transformation of waterfronts from industrial hubs to urban playgrounds through the lenses of preservation, governance, economics, ecology, and more. Presents chapter-length case studies drawn from cities in China, Bangladesh, Turkey, the United States, Malaysia, the European Union, Egypt, and other countries. Includes contributions from an interdisciplinary team of international scholars and professionals, a much-needed corrective to the historical exclusion of researchers and issues from the Global South. An ideal reference for graduate students, scholars, and professionals in urban planning, architecture, geography, and history, the Handbook of Waterfront Cities and Urbanism deserves to be on the shelf of urban authorities and any internationally minded academic or practitioner in real estate development, water management, preservation, or tourism.

Evaluating Environmental and Social Impact Assessment in Developing Countries
Evaluating Environmental and Social Impact Assessment in Developing Countries

Author: Salim Momtaz

Publisher: Newnes

Published: 2013-04-05

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0124080707

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Evaluating Environmental and Social Impact Assessment in Developing Countries is a valuable reference book for practitioners and researchers conducting research in and developing studies on environmental science and management and environmental and social impact assessment. The book's authors have developed and tested a new framework to evaluate environmental impact assessment (EIA) systems that may be adopted by most developing countries with EIA experience. Application of this framework will help determine if the EIA is achieving its intended goal of sustainable development in these countries. It also explains the reasons behind the strengths and weaknesses from which the development practitioners and international development partners can take lessons. This book will help the reader answer such questions as "What are the best forms of public participation?" and "How do we measure contributions to EIA procedure?" since it is based on direct experiences from a developing country that is struggling with many of these issues. Evaluating Environmental and Social Impact Assessment in Developing Countries provides further understanding of appropriate tools to evaluate environmental and social impacts of development initiatives especially in developing countries. - Demonstrates the development of an integrated holistic method that presents new research in the field - Offers a thorough analytical assessment of an EIA system in a developing country - Presents valuable insights into how developing countries are coping with the new phenomenon of public participation and involvement in environmental decision making and what methods and techniques have been successful - Includes a chapter on social impact assessment in developing countries with special focus on Bangladesh, providing valuable information applicable to developing countries

Threatening Dystopias
Threatening Dystopias

Author: Kasia Paprocki

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1501759175

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Bangladesh is currently ranked as one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world. In Threatening Dystopias, Kasia Paprocki investigates the politics of climate change adaptation throughout the South Asian nation. Drawing on ethnographic and archival fieldwork, she engages with developers, policy makers, scientists, farmers, and rural migrants to show how Bangladeshi and global elites ignore the history of landscape transformation and its attendant political conflicts. Paprocki looks at how groups craft economic narratives and strategies that redistribute power and resources away from peasant communities. Although these groups claim that increased production of export commodities will reframe the threat of climate change into an opportunity for economic development and growth, the reality is not so simple. For the country's rural poor, these promises ring hollow. As development dispossesses the poor from agrarian livelihoods, outmigration from peasant communities leads to precarious existences in urban centers. And a vision of development in which urbanization and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable is not one the land and its people can sustain. Threatening Dystopias shows how a powerful rural movement, although hampered by an all-consuming climate emergency, is seeking climate justice in Bangladesh.

Groundwater Environment in Asian Cities
Groundwater Environment in Asian Cities

Author: Sangam Shrestha

Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann

Published: 2016-02-11

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 0128031670

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Groundwater contributes to the sustainable development of many Asian cities by providing water for domestic, industrial and agricultural uses and regulating ecosystem flows. However, groundwater has not always been properly managed, which often has resulted in depletion and degradation of the resource. Groundwater Environment in Asian Cities presents the up-to-date scientific knowledge on groundwater environment in fourteen Asian cities using Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework. In detail the book presents the facts and figures of groundwater dependency, problems related to groundwater over exploitation, implementation of various policy instruments and management practices and their results in selected fourteen Asian cities, namely; Bandung (Indonesia), Bangkok (Thailand), Beijing (China), Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), Chitwan (Nepal), Delhi (India), Dili (East Timor), Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam), Hyderabad (India), Khulna (Bangladesh), Lahore (Pakistan), Seoul (South Korea), Tokyo (Japan), and Yangon (Myanmar). The book provides the one-step platform to get sufficient details about groundwater aquifers, hydrogeology, groundwater status, impacts on groundwater environment and responses (technology, policy, institutional, etc.) deployed in the case studies cities, and therefore, provides a snap-shot of Asian groundwater environments. The theoretical background of the topics discussed along with the case studies help the readers understand the similarities and differences about the status of groundwater development and use in each city. In addition, the information in the book will serve as a baseline for other research such as mitigation of groundwater related problems (e.g., land subsidence), impact of climate change on groundwater, and importance of groundwater for implementing sustainable development goals in future. - Presents a framework for evaluating groundwater environment in urban environments - Includes case studies and local examples from a broad geographical range of urban environments from virtually every region in Asia, including Bandung, Bangkok, Delhi, Bishkek, Beijing and Tokyo - The book will be a valuable resource for groundwater adversaries in the scientific, decision-making and end-user communities, particularly for understanding and assessing state of groundwater resources in the region as well as learning from the responses practiced so far (Dr. Linda Anne Stevenson, APN) - The contents in this book are very much useful for informed decision-making for protecting groundwater environemntand therefore contributes in making invisible visible (Dr. Neno Kukuric, IGRAC) - With concrete examples and lessons for readers, this book responds to the call for comprehensive research and studies, the implementation of new science-based methodologies and endorsement of principles for groundwater resources management and cities (Dr. Aureli Alice, UNESCO-IHP) - As a "Regional Hub for Groundwater Management in the Asia Pacific Region, IGES finds this book as a very much useful reference for knowledge hub partners, groundwater managers, academic institutions, research scholars, and international organizations working in the areas of groundwater in Asia and beyond (Dr. Hideyuki Mori, IGES)

Misreading the Bengal Delta
Misreading the Bengal Delta

Author: Camelia Dewan

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2021-11-01

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0295749628

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An unexpected story of climate change initiatives that threaten a complex waterscape Perilously close to sea level and vulnerable to floods, erosion, and cyclones, Bangladesh is one of the top recipients of development aid earmarked for climate change adaptation. Yet, to what extent do adaptation projects address local needs and concerns? Combining environmental history and ethnographic fieldwork with development professionals, rural farmers, and landless women, Misreading the Bengal Delta critiques development narratives of Bangladesh as a “climate change victim.” It examines how development actors repackage colonial-era modernizing projects, which have caused severe environmental effects, as climate-adaptation solutions. Seawalls meant to mitigate against cyclones and rising sea levels instead silt up waterways and induce drainage-related flooding. Other adaptation projects, from saline aquaculture to high-yield agriculture, threaten soil fertility, biodiversity, and livelihoods. Bangladesh’s environmental crisis goes beyond climate change, extending to coastal vulnerabilities that are entwined with underemployment, debt, and the lack of universal healthcare. This timely book analyzes how development actors create flawed causal narratives linking their interventions in the environment and society of the Global South to climate change. Ultimately, such misreadings risk exacerbating climatic threats and structural inequalities.

Science and Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia
Science and Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia

Author: Rajib Shaw

Publisher: Academic Press

Published: 2017-10-13

Total Pages: 525

ISBN-13: 0128127120

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Science and Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction in Asia: Potentials and Challenges provides both a local and global perspective on how to implement the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. Topics demonstrate the advancement of scientific research as it applies to early warning systems, including identifying risk and the strengthening of infrastructure for different types of hazards. Through different major disasters, it has become evident that there must be a balance between hard and soft technology and physical, process and social solutions. This book demonstrates how this has been successfully implemented in Asia, and how these applications can apply on a global basis. - Covers new research on the role of science in Disaster Risk Reduction and lessons learned when research has been applied - Utilizes case studies to outline the broader lessons learned - Focuses on the Sendai Framework, which was adopted in the Third UN World Conference in 2015