BANGLADESH INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AND STRATEGIC STUDIES

SUSTAINABLE FLOOD MANAGEMENT IN BANGLADESH: ADDRESSING THE CHALLENGES

Author: Sajid Karim, Mahbubur Rashid Bhuiyan

DOI Link: https://www.doi.org/10.56888/BIISSj2018v39n1a1

ABSTRACT

Floods are a common and longstanding natural hazard in Bangladesh. Nowadays, it is worsening due to unplanned urbanization and development activities, rapid population growth, faulty structural interventions and adverse impact of climate change, with more intensity and frequency than ever before. Despite various policy initiatives and institutional mechanisms, the country is yet to achieve sustainable flood management (SFM) that aims at developing maximum possible socioeconomic resilience against flooding, while protecting natural flow of rivers and the environment. Flood management in Bangladesh focuses heavily on structural measures than non-structural ones albeit the latter in many cases, more viable and useful for the country considering its geophysical location and hydrological characteristics. In this backdrop, the paper is an attempt to find out challenges that impede SFM in Bangladesh and provide recommendations to address those. It identifies unplanned use of floodplains, altering natural flow of water bodies, fragmented water resource management, lack of regional and international cooperation in river basin management, overreliance on structural measures, lack of good governance, absence of supervision, monitoring and evaluation process in management, limited participation of community people and local level disaster management committees in policy decisions and lack of knowledge-based management as key challenges for Bangladesh. The paper advocates for proper floodplain management, integrated water resource management, catchment based river basin management, establishing good governance, effective supervision, monitoring and evaluation procedure, strengthening local-level disaster management committees, participation of community people in policy decision and knowledge-based management to overcome the challenges.