Attachments
The Shelter Cluster Bangladesh has developed the “Environmental Profile for Shelter Response” to fill a gap in the knowledge base of the cluster highlighted during past responses. The profile informs environmentally sustainable shelter programming by making key information about environmental considerations, impacts, concerns and opportunities relevant to shelter and settlements programming available and accessible to Shelter Cluster partners. Version 1 was completed in 2019 and updated in 2022 - 2023.
This profile covers the whole country - with additional emphasis on flood and cyclone prone areas and areas with refugee influx - and is not intended to be exhaustive. It is meant to provide a quick basic understanding of the country-wide context and the most crucial factors relevant for environmentally sustainable shelter related operations. It is particularly to support humanitarian shelter actors with little knowledge of environmental concerns in Bangladesh. It aims to save the user time in investigating these issues by compiling existing information and pointing to key issues, additional sources of information and further references. After a disaster, the information in this profile should be contextualised based on the impacts of the disaster. The information in this document can serve as a baseline of environmental issues facing the country of relevance to humanitarian shelter and settlements interventions.
For more in-depth information on local building practices in Bangladesh, refer to the Bangladesh Shelter Response Profile on local building cultures created for the Shelter Cluster. In order not to duplicate information from this resource, regular references are made to this profile.
The checklist and annexes are living documents that can be revised and added to by the Shelter Cluster over time as new information becomes available. Future revisions will help to ensure that environmental and shelter and settlement related issues and practices vary greatly across Bangladesh.
The profile was developed with financial support from DG ECHO and USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance.