Objective/Mission
The objective of the socioeconomic workstream is to enhance strategic planning in Bangladesh to increase its climate resiliency. Our tools and expertise consider many complex socio-economic relationships and feedbacks, such as changes in management and land-use allocation; shifts in demand for food, crops, and aquaculture products as prices and incomes change; and changing patterns of domestic and international trade. Using information on biophysical impacts from the other workstreams of the Jameel Observatory CREWSnet project, the integrated environmental-socioeconomic framework will enable an assessment of economic impacts of various climate-related changes and types of responsive actions under a wide range of stressors.
Assessment of the Bangladesh National Adaptation Plan
Our activities will connect the decision-making at local, regional, and national levels. Integrating physical and socioeconomic impacts will allow for a consistent evaluation of different impact channels and support development planning in Bangladesh. Based on actions outlined in the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) of Bangladesh for 2023-2050, we will enhance the understanding of opportunities and challenges for building climate resilience through effective adaptation and mitigation strategies to foster a robust society of Bangladesh and achieve a sustainable economic development. The NAP is expected to be updated in five-year cycles, and we are in a process of interacting with NAP stakeholders to assess our potential inputs to the next edition of the Bangladesh NAP.
The activities of Jameel Observatory CREWSnet in agriculture and livelihood resilience, water security, housing, and shelter resilience appropriately align with the NAP priorities and interventions. As illustrated in Figure 16, water resources, disaster and social safety, agriculture, and aquaculture are among the main focus areas for the NAP interventions and investment needs. NAP is designed to maintain a synergy with other development plans of Bangladesh (such as Bangladesh Delta Plan).
For climate projections, the NAP currently uses IPCC scenarios (CMIP6), focusing on SSP5-8.5 and SSP1-2.6 scenarios. It also widely uses the maps from the Center for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS). Detailed climate projections of Jameel Observatory CREWSnet can valuably contribute to a substantial enhancement of the Bangladesh-specific climate information to provide actionable information for the next edition of the Bangladesh NAP.
Progress in Year 3
We continue making substantial progress on socioeconomic assessment of climate-change impacts on Bangladesh. From May 2024 to the end of April 2025 (Year 3 of the project), our research team developed an economy-wide multi-sector tool for Bangladesh for identifying the needs and capacities that can be aligned with the most relevant climate finance sources. Our tool also has been updated to assess the climate impacts on different economic sectors of Bangladesh. In particular, we used the updated climate scenarios from the MRCM for wet-bulb temperature, dry-bulb temperature, and precipitation in Bangladesh to investigate economic impacts of climate change on crop and labor productivity.
Continuing collaborative efforts with the Jameel Observatory CREWSnet teams on regional climate and heatwave forecasting, agriculture, water availability, and salinity are informative for converting the results of their climate and biophysical modelling into impact channels to evaluate socio-economic impacts of climate change in Bangladesh. The tool that we are developing will be a part of our analytical approach of integrating specific pathways by which biophysical changes and adaptive measures link to changes in the socioeconomic interactions. This information will be used for collaborating with the Bangladesh NAP stakeholders for the next edition of the NAP. We also investigate the impacts of international climate finance on Bangladesh Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and its different economic sectors.
Our work ties into each of the three Flagship Areas and Associated Initiatives. In particular, we are working with the Housing and Shelters Resilience Flagship and the Adaptation Fortress Initiative to estimate the need for the number and capacity of new shelters and AFs, and the cost of building and maintaining them, including provision of water, connection to medical services and roads, making shelters gender-friendly, and other characteristics.
In our economy-wide tool, we continue to develop a representation of the impacts of water shortages on socio-economic characteristics, including the potential impacts from changes in water and soil-salinity levels. We incorporate the corresponding impact channels, and using information from the water flagship, we will be able to evaluate the investment needs for providing water security.
We explicitly represent the following sectors related to agriculture, aquaculture, livestock, and food processing: rice, wheat, cereal grains, vegetables-fruit-nuts, oil seeds, sugar cane/sugar beet, plant-based fibers, cattle, poultry, wool animals, fishing and shrimps, forestry, cattle meat, other meat, vegetable oils, dairy products, processed rice, sugar and molasses, and other prepared food in our economy-wide tool. Based on the information from the Agriculture and Livelihood Resilience Flagship, we evaluate climate impacts on these sectors. In particular, based on the severity of the sectoral impacts, we assess the prioritization of climate adaptation actions in agriculture of Bangladesh. We established a connection to potential changes in crops based on the updated crop calendar by the Crop Calendar Initiative in order to evaluate their impacts on agricultural markets.