environments Article Living with the Risks of Cyclone Disasters in the South-Western Coastal Region of Bangladesh Bishawjit Mallick 1,2,3, Bayes Ahmed 4,5,* and Joachim Vogt 3 1 International Migration Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3TB, UK;
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[email protected] 2 Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 372 03, USA 3 Institute of Regional Science (IfR), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe 76131, Germany;
[email protected] 4 Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction, Department of Earth Sciences, University College London (UCL), Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK 5 Department of Disaster Science and Management, Faculty of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Dhaka, Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh * Correspondence:
[email protected] Academic Editors: Jason K. Levy and Peiyong Yu Received: 9 December 2016; Accepted: 4 February 2017; Published: 9 February 2017 Abstract: Bangladesh is one of the most disaster prone countries in the world. Cyclone disasters that affect millions of people, destroy homesteads and livelihoods, and trigger migration are common in the coastal region of Bangladesh. The aim of this article is to understand how the coastal communities in Bangladesh deal with the continuous threats of cyclones. As a case study, this study investigates communities that were affected by the Cyclone Sidr in 2007 and Cyclone Aila in 2009, covering 1555 households from 45 coastal villages in the southwestern region of Bangladesh. The survey method incorporated household based questionnaire techniques and community based focus group discussions. The pre-event situation highlights that the affected communities were physically vulnerable due to the strategic locations of the cyclone shelters nearer to those with social supreme status and the location of their houses in relatively low-lying lands.