Importance of Ecological indicator development for coastal forest management strategies to adopt upcoming climate impacts of Bangladesh.

Shampa Biswas

Institute of Silviculture, Department of Forest and Soil Sciences

University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria

shampa.bd@gmail.com

The coast of Bangladesh is famous zone of vulnerabilities and opportunities as it is very prone to natural disasters (like cyclone, storm surge and flood) and combination of natural and man-made hazards (like erosion, high arsenic content in ground water, water logging, earthquake, water and soil salinity, risks from climate change). For example, The Cox’s Bazar coastal zone (Chakaria Sundarbans) has a great importance for its abundant coastal natural resources since prehistoric times. But resources have been under-utilized and over-utilized due to lack of appropriate guidelines for natural resource conservation and utilization as local people are dependent on coast for fishing, farming, and agriculture and trading. During the 1980s, the entire Chakaria Sundarban was converted into shrimp ponds on the grounds that substrate in the area was too saline to support mangrove forest. The scattered mangrove forest along the eastern part of the coast is not under management and disappearing rapidly. The urgent need is: 1) to rehabilitate the natural and planed mangroves with community based coastal resource management practices, 2) to know the effects of bundles of environmental problems on ecosystem structure and functions that are still not well known.

Development of ecological indicators will help to measure the ecological quality of forest ecosystem to balance socio-economic and ecological aspects in decision making for coastal forest management strategies that would show a clear and simple scenario of complex, uncertain and dynamic nature of the current situation. As a consequence, use of indicators in management and policy process would focus on ascertaining valuable issues like what parameter to include, data requirements, or cause and effect relations.  The output of the research would challenge the vulnerable situation of climate change impacts at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh

Ecological indicators have been developing by many nations in the world. Some countries included ecological indicators in national policy documents to ensure sustainable natural resource management. It highlights environmental benefits rather than deterioration.  As ecological indicators will be assessed not only by scientists from the coastal area seeking to maximize the potential benefits, but also by combinations of program administrator, physical scientists, social scientists, and political scientists, and politicians. So, this research would try to meet the diverse demands of various consumer groups, the needs of forest user groups and the realities of managing coastal forest. Today’s main concern is to build up adaptive competence and facilitate actions for reducing vulnerability and improve resilience of local people who have been living around the coastal region of Bangladesh. In addition, Bangladesh is one of the most highly disaster-prone countries of the world due to its geographical location where much of the land is barely above sea level and is intersected by 230 rivers. Assessment of ecological indicators would support policy makers to formulate an adoptive and effective coastal management strategies including both scientific and local ecological knowledge in natural resource management.