In the last few decades, disaster risk reduction programs and climate initiatives across the globe have focused largely on the intimate connections between vulnerability, recovery, adaptation, and coping mechanisms. Recent focus, however, is increasingly paid to community resilience. Community, placed at the intersection between the household and national levels of social organization, is crucial in addressing economic, social, or environmental disturbances disrupting human security. Resilience measures a community’s capability of bouncing back—restoring the original pre-disaster state, as well as bouncing forward—the capacity to cope with emerging post-disaster situations and changes. Both the ‘bouncing back’ and ‘moving forward’ properties of a community are shaped and reshaped by internal and external shocks such as climate threats, the community’s resilience dimensions, and the intensity of economic, social, and other community capitals. This article reviews (1) the concept of resilience in relation to climate change and vulnerability; and (2) emerging perspectives on community-level impacts of climate change, resilience dimensions, and community capitals. It argues that overall resilience of a place-based community is located at the intersection of the community’s resilience dimensions, community capitals, and the level of climate disruptions.

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Local contexts as well as levels of exposure play a substantial role in defining a community’s perception of climate and environmental vulnerabilities. In order to assess a community’s adaptation strategies, understanding of how different groups in that community comprehend climate change is crucial. Public risk perception is important as it can induce or confine political, economic, and social actions dealing with particular hazards. Climate change adaptation is a well-established policy discourse in Bangladesh that has made its people more or less aware of it. Similarly, shrimp-farming communities in southwestern Bangladesh understand environmental and climate change in their own ways. In order to understand how the shrimp-farming communities in coastal Bangladesh perceive current climate instabilities, we conducted a qualitative study in shrimp-farming villages in coastal Bangladesh where about 80% of commercial shrimp of the country is cultivated. We compared farmers’ perceptions of local climate change with existing scientific knowledge and found remarkable similarities. Our assessment shows that at least two factors are critical for this outcome: coastal people’s exposure to and experience of frequent climate extremes; and a radical approach to defining climate regimes in Bangladesh by various stakeholders and the media, depicting anthropogenic global warming as a certainty for the country. Thus, a convergence of scientific construct and sociocultural construct construes the level of awareness of the general public about climate change.

Over the last few decades, the global shrimp aquaculture industry has grown considerably and experienced important transformations in coastal regions in the Global South. However, despite being a major contributor to GDP and export earnings of the country, the shrimp industry in Bangladesh is not yet fully developed. This important sector is often plagued by numerous environmental challenges including frequent climate disasters. To address local climate perturbations, the shrimping industry undertakes a wide range of individual, communal, and institutional level resilience activities. Drawing on primary data collected through ethnography and qualitative interviews in three shrimping communities, this paper examines the nature, effects, and efficacy of resilience strategies adopted by various stakeholders in the shrimp industry in coastal Bangladesh. This research demonstrates that there is a clearly visible resilience gradient in the shrimp aquaculture industry in Bangladesh: individual shrimp farmers and households play a pivotal role in resilience enhancement, while other stakeholders including community, state, and civil society organizations have moderate-to-little involvement in aiding resilience in the sector. The study offers a series of recommendations for resilience to climate change.

This research was made possible by funding from the Nanyang Technological University. I would like to deeply acknowledge that NTU Research Scholarship supported my study at NTU, stay in Singapore, fieldwork in Bangladesh, and participation in a number of conferences including one in Hiroshima. I thank the funders.I would like to express my utmost gratitude and appreciation to my wife, Joyfun Nahar, for her unwavering support and encouragement throughout my PhD programme. She always provided me with the vital emotional support without which I could not finish my job in time. Moreover, she had to take extra responsibility of taking care of all the family affairs in my absence. I am indebted iv to her. I am grateful to my father-in-law, Shabbir Ahmed Mia, who provided the much-needed familial support for me by staying with my wife and kids in my absence. My daughter, Saliha Nazia, who was just eight when I came to Singapore, also encouraged me during this long period of separation. Whenever I felt lonely, I talked to her on telephone or Skype. My little son, Muminur Rahman, who was born two months after I had come to Singapore in 2012, missed my affection and love until now -staying far away from me. He is too young to understand his contributions to this thesis.