For Sima Sana, a resident of Tildanga in Bangladesh, sea-level rise, increased cyclones, and intensifying salinity made farming many traditional crops increasingly difficult. After community consultations Sima and other women farmers have invested in more climate-resilient crops like sunflowers, which produce oil-rich seeds for cooking.

“High tides and cyclones are bringing salinity to our lands and destroying our crop production every year. We lost our standing rice and vegetable crops due to tidal flood, intrusion of saline water during normal high tide and cyclones,” said Sima.

Sima and other residents of the most climate-vulnerable villages located in Khulna district are facing uncertain futures as soil salinity is expected to increase over the next two decades, linked to the impacts of climate change and rising sea-levels on this low-lying delta region.

In 2021 alone, LoGIC Bangladesh trained 6,000 beneficiaries in climate adaptive livelihood options.

Reducing risk, building reslience

“We are extremely fearful about taking any risks in agriculture, but we have no option other than agriculture. We are left with no or minimal income and struggle to make ends meet,” said Sima.

The additional stress from thunderstorms, flooding, and Covid-19 impacts are further intensifying the vulnerability of the residents in the southwest coastal areas, one of the climate change hotspots in South Asia. Poor people with less land and are especially vulnerable to such uncertainty, increasing their displacement potential. There are minimal options to pursue alternate livelihoods or generate income.

Livelihood diversification is the key to resilience. However, most families lack the knowledge, technology, capacity, risk financing, and additional money to try and test new alternatives to expand their options.

The LoGIC project is working to do just that by supporting the most climate-vulnerable women to build resilience against climate change by enabling them to undertake local-led climate adaptative livelihoods by providing a Community Resilience Fund (CRF).

The joint initiative with the Government of Bangladesh, EU, Sweden, UNDP and UNCDF brings new technologies, helps women to build capacity, and provides start-up support with risk financing to build confidence on the economic and environmental return of the latest technology for adaptation. While working with the lowest tier of local government institutions, LoGIC ensures leased land, agricultural aid, business development plan, and relevant training.

Through Community Resilience Fund support, Sima invested in saline resistant sunflower cultivation, which is more climate adaptive than the traditional crops that she wants to avoid. After a successful cultivation, she had a good yield despite the same salinity she experienced in previous years.

“We nurtured the sunflowers on the field every day, and in two months, our hard work paid off, and we were successfully able to harvest saline tolerant sunflower seeds,” she said with a smile.

“We ground these seeds to make oil. We have put aside some of the oil for our year-round consumption and sold the rest at a profit.”

“The revenue has enabled us to expand the sunflower cultivation to a bigger scale and has given us a stable income source, says Sima. She is now working with fellow women to develop a year-round business plan to ensure optimal use of their funds received from LoGIC. LoGIC’s unique model has gained confidence of women like Sima by ensuring financial inclusion, market linkages and enabled them to further scale up their adaptive livelihood portfolio.

LoGIC/ LoCAL

The LoGIC project is funded by the Swedish Development agency (SIDA), European Union (EU), UNCDF and UNDP and in Bangladesh is rolling out Phase II of the LoCAL Facility. LoGIC works with local governments using LoCAL's system of Performance Based Climate Resilience Grants to channel resources to the community level for locally led adaptation that includes technical support and capacity building. The original version of this article appeared on the UNDP Bangladesh website in 2021 and has been adapted for republication here with kind permission.