Assessing climate change-induced losses and damages to coastal ecosystem services: Empirical evidence from Manpura Island, Bangladesh

Abstract

Under the on-going climate change, slow-onset events, such as sea-level rise and salinity intrusion, have a more pronounced effect on biodiversity and ecosystem services, which have fewer options for adaptation compared to human systems, resulting in losses and damages. People who rely on ecosystems are also experiencing substantial damages and irreversible losses. Therefore, accurately assessing the losses and damages to ecosystem services becomes crucial. To address this issue, this paper employs an analytical framework adopted from Geest et al. (2019) and conducts a case study on the effects of extreme and slow-onset events on a coastal island of Bangladesh to evaluate the current losses and damages to ecosystem services. The study estimates the economic losses and damages to individual households, specifically in terms of some provisioning services, such as rice and fish, ranging from US$28 to US$419 per household. Furthermore, the case study elucidates the diverse values that individuals attributed to ecosystem services in their everyday lives, as well as non-economic losses, damages, and harms that are rooted in human emotions and experiences. It highlights non-economic losses and damages such as the gradual decline of social unity, an increase in mental illness, long-term physical health consequences, increased feelings of insecurity, and the depletion of fertile topsoil. The research concludes that building human capital for ecosystem-based adaptation is crucial to mitigating these impacts. It emphasises the need of documenting losses and damages locally using web-based recordkeeping in order to take evidence-based action to address losses and damages.