Cyclone risk assessment of the Cox’s Bazar district and Rohingya refugee camps in southeast Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh has a long history of devastating tropical cyclones. In view of the effects of the storms on the country, risk assessment is essential for devising the mitigation strategies at various levels. 2 By way of bringing the conceptual structure of general risk model in practice, this work aims to examine the spatial patterns of cyclone risk in the Cox's Bazar district (I) and Rohingya refugee camps (II) located on the southeastern coast of Bangladesh. We use 14 parameters representing the hazard, exposure, and vulnerability as the components of risk. The selected parameters were analyzed and integrated though the complementary use of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Geographic Information System (GIS) for depicting the cyclone risk situation comprehensively at both the spatial scales. The status of the cyclone risk was identified and quantified as very high (6.84%, 3.43%), high (45.78%, 27.82%), moderate (5.97%, 39.42%), low (40.62%, 28.70%), and very low (0.81%, 0.61%) for the spatial scale I and II respectively. In general, northwestern and southern peripheral areas exhibited higher risk than the central and northeastern parts of the Cox's Bazar district; and in the refugee settlements, camp number 1E, 1W, 7, and 13 revealed relative ly higher levels of the risk. The results of the assessment (I) were correlated with experiential damage from the 1991 cyclone; a reasonable consistency was noticed between the simulated scenario and the observed impacts. We assume that the deliverables of this spatial analysis could be useful to stakeholders while formulating the cyclone risk mitigation policies for the region. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that the applied method would deliver reliable results if tested in other coastal environments.

Cyclone vulnerability assessment of the western coast of Bangladesh

“…Most of these tropical cyclones hit the coastal areas of Bangladesh (Hoque et al 2019;Karim and Mimura 2008). Bangladesh has a very prolonged history of tropical cyclones (Alam et al 2020). Many of these cyclones have caused the coastal areas with large area destruction, loss of human lives, and extensive property damages (Alam et al 2020;Hossain 2015).…”

“…Bangladesh has a very prolonged history of tropical cyclones (Alam et al 2020). Many of these cyclones have caused the coastal areas with large area destruction, loss of human lives, and extensive property damages (Alam et al 2020;Hossain 2015). About 500,000 and 140,000 people have lost their lives by two notable tropical cyclones that made landfall in the coastal areas of Bangladesh in 1970 and 1991, respectively (Alam and Dominey-Howes 2015;Sattar and Cheung 2019).…”

“…About 500,000 and 140,000 people have lost their lives by two notable tropical cyclones that made landfall in the coastal areas of Bangladesh in 1970 and 1991, respectively (Alam and Dominey-Howes 2015;Sattar and Cheung 2019). Cyclone Sidr that hit in 2007, killed 3,500 people and incurred around $1.67 billion US dollars' worth of economic loss (Alam et al 2020). Cyclone Aila that made landfall in 2009 caused 190 deaths; injured 7000 people; and destroyed more than 500,000 houses (Ahmed et al 2016).…”

“…Several mapping approaches have been used for assessing spatial tropical cyclone vulnerability using geospatial techniques (Ali et al 2020;Hoque et al 2019;Mazumdar and Paul 2018;Rao et al 2013). Multi-criteria integrating mapping techniques are considered best as these provide detailed spatial vulnerability information of tropical cyclone impacts (Alam et al 2020;Ali et al 2020). Among the spatial multi-criteria evaluation approaches, the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is the most appropriate approach popularly used in the literature (Hategekimana et al 2018;Tahri et al 2017).…”

Improving our understanding of wind extremes from Bangladesh tropical cyclones: insights from a high-resolution convection-permitting numerical model

“…Hoque et al, 2016Hoque et al, , 2019 or particular areas (e.g. Alam et al, 2020). In both cases, the quality of hazard and/or risk assessment is limited by available observational and track data.…”