Elsevier

Environmental Development

Volume 17, January 2016, Pages 21-32
Environmental Development

Recent trends of human wellbeing in the Bangladesh delta

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envdev.2015.09.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Although recent studies show that human wellbeing on global and national scales is improving, it is important to monitor the regional progress of human wellbeing and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Here we provide an assessment of human wellbeing in the south-west coastal part of Bangladesh by analysing Household Expenditure Survey (HIES) and Demographic Health Survey (DHS) data from 1995 to 2010. Indicators have been selected based on the five dimensions of human wellbeing, including health, material condition, personal security and freedom of choice and actions. This study shows that the south-west coastal region has made commendable progress in meeting the target MGDs goal for ‘child and maternal health’. However, the areas of ‘personal security’ and ‘freedom of choice and action’ have not achieved the target MDGs despite showing substantial progress for ‘poverty alleviation’ (17%), ‘sanitation coverage’ (40%) and ‘education’ (23%). Incomes from fishery and ‘non-ecosystem’ based livelihood have increased 76% and 8% respectively, whereas income from shrimp and agriculture show declining trends. Production costs have increased substantially since 1995 in response to a rise in GDP. At a household level, proxy indicators of provisioning services, such as crop production, are positively correlated with poverty alleviation. Overall, greater attention on education and sustainable land use is required if Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are to be achieved by 2030.

Section snippets

Background

Human wellbeing is the subset of economic (e.g. GDP, income) and social wellbeing (e.g. education, health) factors (OECD, 2013) and has been classified into five dimensions: health (e.g. child mortality), material (e.g. income), security (e.g. sanitation), freedom and social relations (MA, 2005). Human wellbeing has been used to measure the progress of humanity such as the “health for all” goal set in 1990 and to design development strategies (McGillivray and Clarke, 2006). However, monitoring

Study area

We have selected the south-west coastal part of Bangladesh as our study area (Fig. 1). This area represents 16% of the total land (∼25,000 km2) of Bangladesh, with a population of 14 million (BBS, 2010). This south-west coastal ecosystem produces more than 1300 million USD of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (BBS, 2010), contributing 277 USD GDP per person (Sarwar 2005). However, around 38% people of this region live below the poverty line (BBS, 2010). HIES data indicate that livelihoods in this

Health

In 1993, the infant mortality (Fig. 2a) rate was 95.5 per 1000 live births which declined to 42.5 per 1000 live births in 2011. Child mortality (Fig. 2a) shows a decline from 1993 to 2011, although the decreases were small between 1996 and 2004. Child mortality declined from 38 per 1000 live births in 1993 to 24.45 per 1000 live births in 1996 but rose to 25.7 per 1000 live births in 2000. Since 2000, it has declined by 16.7 per 1000 live births within 10 years. Similarly, maternal health (Fig.

Discussion

Data unavailability was a major limitation of this study. For example, we could not construct yearly time series data for all the indicators as the datasets are collected every five years (e.g. HIES). HIES and DHS datasets are only representative at national and divisional level, thus, we are only able to investigate the trends aggregated over the all nine districts in our study region from 1995 to 2010, and not carry out analyses at the district level. In addition, HIES datasets do not cover

Conclusions

  • Since the 1990s, child mortality and infant mortality have declined 50% and 75% respectively in the south-west coastal area of Bangladesh. Moreover, the number of births attended by trained personnel also increased (28%) from 1993 to 2011.

  • Data for the material condition, such as incomes from agriculture, fishing and Non-ES based livelihoods, have increased from 1995 to 2010. Income from fishing has shown a sharply increasing trend since 2000. Even though GDP from shrimp farms is sharply

Acknowledgement

Md. Sarwar Hossain acknowledges financial support provided by a joint NERC/ESRC interdisciplinary PhD studentship award (1223260) and the University of Southampton. John Dearing acknowledges the project ‘Assessing health, livelihoods, ecosystem services and poverty alleviation in populous deltas’ (NE/J002755/1) funded by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation Programme (ESPA). The UK ESPA programme is funded by the Department for International Development (DFID), the Economic and Social

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