Resilience of coastal agricultural systems in Bangladesh: Assessment for agroecosystem stewardship strategies

Assessments of resilience are becoming a priority across multiple sectors. Specifically, the coastal agricultural system in Bangladesh faces a multitude of problems such as sea level rise. Building resilience for this system is thus important in accelerating the country's socio-economic development. Therefore, the objectives of this study are (a) to assess resilience of coastal agricultural systems and (b) to develop coastal agroecosystem stewardship strategies in Bangladesh. Resilience was assessed quantitatively, based on an established framework that includes three capacities (i.e., absorptive, adaptive and transformative) and five dimensions, namely, social, economic, ecological, physical and institutional. Fifteen indicators were developed by applying an assemblage of top-down and bottom-up approaches. A structured questionnaire was used to survey 330 households from 15 villages in five coastal sub-districts. The percentile value of composite resilience indices revealed that one-fifths of the coastal farmers (or households) had a mixed ability (e.g., fish farming skills) and capacity (e.g., better decision-making) to recover, reorganise and evolve following shocks (e.g., flash flood) and stresses (e.g., water logging). Following resilience assessment, five coastal agroecosystem stewardship strategies (facilitating adaptive agricultural governance; promoting economic and ecological diversity; fostering social learning; investing in coastal infrastructure; and increasing agricultural productivity) are developed based on principal component analysis. The methods of objectively developing stewardship strategies can be replicable to other coastal areas. The findings of this study are intended to be used for contributing to coastal adaptation planning in Bangladesh, especially for the Delta Plan 2100.