The dynamics among poverty, vulnerability and resilience: evidence from coastal Bangladesh
Natural Hazards, September 2015, doi:10.1007/s11069-015-1950-0
This paper presents an empirical investigation of socioeconomic resilience to natural hazard-triggered disasters of tropical cyclone affected communities in southwestern coastal Bangladesh. Applying the ‘Access model’ framework, it presents that tropical Cyclone Aila invoked detrimental impacts on the communities, especially in terms of consumption, employment and access to resources. Its findings also revealed that the poor were more vulnerable and thus suffered significantly higher financial, settlement, and physical damage. Nonetheless, such a high degree of vulnerability did not necessarily result in a low level of resilience since the poor households demonstrated a better ability to withstand perturbations and stresses than their non-poor neighbors. This contravenes the ‘flip side’ dogma conventionally assumed between vulnerability and resilience (i.e., vulnerability is the flip side of resilience). The results further indicate that an increasing degree of risk from tropical cyclones is likely to affect the consumption and socioeconomic status of the coastal communities.
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