Economic and non-economic loss and damage to climate change: evidence from a developing country shrimp farms to cyclone Bulbul

Abstract

Loss and damage have become a vital contemporary issue in climate change studies and actions in developing countries. However, studies are scant on this in the fisheries sector around the world. In Bangladesh, there is no study on the loss and damage in fisheries dependent communities. This study assesses economic and non-economic loss and damage to coastal shrimp farms due to cyclone Bulbul in Gabura Union of Shyamnagar Upazila, Satkhira district, using a mixed method approach. Results show that all shrimp farms' dependent communities are affected by cyclone Bulbul to some extent. About 14%, 57%, and 29% of the farms were totally, heavily and moderately damaged due to farm inundation and dyke damage. The estimated mean loss and damage per shrimp farm was worth USD 4,633. Around 31% and 72% of the farms' fencing nets and traps were lost, which was worth USD 333 per farm. There were also loss and damage to other resources such as houses, solar panels, livestock and agricultural crops where the estimated mean loss and damage per household was worth USD 3,170. This study reported that the rich shrimp farmers encountered proportionately more economic loss and damage than their poor counterparts. However, this does not mean that the poor suffered less. The current study found a range of non-economic loss and damage in different aspects of the shrimp farmers' household members such as unbearable mental pain, deterioration of health, physical injuries, disabilities, etc. and access to services (e.g., inadequate food, lack of safe drinking water, lack of medical facilities, disruption of education systems), social infrastructure (e.g., damage of roads and markets) and disturbance of cultural functions. The findings suggest that urgent short-and long-term actions may be taken to save the aquaculture farms and dependent livelihoods from economic and non-economic loss and damage to cyclones in future.

Climate change impacts increase economic inequality: evidence from a systematic literature review

“…We note that a large share of the papers for which physical assets are identified as the main channel show that inequalities are decreasing due to climate change or that the rich are more impacted. Those correspond to the previously highlighted papers where rich agents incur a higher loss due to the higher value of their property [32,34]. This is consistent with empirical evidence gathered elsewhere that richer households can also be vulnerable to climate-related shocks because they have a high concentration of capital assets [43], for instance in the case of livestock [44].…”

“…Indeed, this conservative approach might have led us to underreport the evidence of the regressive effect of climate change on economic inequality because of our decision not to categorise studies that did not make explicit statements on those effects. In the final list of papers, only two studies conclude that climate change decreases inequality, both of which focus on very specific local circumstances [36,37], and four papers identify the rich, either households [32,33], counties [34], or countries [35], as being more impacted by climate change, again mostly in very specific settings. The main exceptions are found to be a few studies where rich agents incur higher losses due to the higher size or value of owned physical assets.…”

“…While the majority of papers (75 out of 127) do not explicitly conclude on the effect of climate change on inequality, most of those papers still identify the poor as being the most impacted (55%), while four papers identify the rich (households [32,33], counties [34], or countries [35]) as being the most impacted. Three of the those four papers focus on very local situations: one in the particular case of tropical cyclone Bulbul in Bangladesh, where rich shrimp farmers incurred higher losses (explained by the larger size of their farms) [32], one in the case of wildfires in the US, where owners of high-value properties also incurred higher losses [34], and one focusing on the Ethiopian Awash basin, where poor households were found to benefit more from additional rainfall, and suffer less from a decrease in rainfall than non-poor households [33]. One paper with a global scope finds that rich countries are most impacted by climate change, in the particular case of extreme Note that the x-axis gives the share of occurrences in the corpus.…”