The activities proposed hereafter are still subject to the adoption of the financing decision ECHO/WWD/BUD/2013/01000
- CONTEXT
Bangladesh ranks 146th out of 187 countries in the 2011 Human Development Index (HDI), which is a drop from position 129 in 2010. Bangladesh also ranks 2 in the European Commission's Global Needs Assessment (GNA) vulnerability index and 2 in the crisis index.
Bangladesh is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world exposed to a variety of natural disasters, including cyclones, floods and earthquakes. On average, every year 6,188 lives and US$ 550 million are lost due to the impact of disasters. On a global level Bangladesh ranks, respectively, 1st and 6th globally in terms of vulnerability and human exposure to floods and cyclone. Similarly, the country is highly exposed to the risk of tsunami (3rd out of 76 countries) and earthquakes (17th out of 153 countries), landslides (35th out of 162) and drought (63rd out of 162 countries). According to recent reports, Bangladesh faces extreme risks to climate change and ranks 2nd on the Climate Change Vulnerability Index.Being mostly low-lying and in the confluence of two large Asian rivers (the Ganges and the Brahmaputra) much of the country is prone to widespread seasonal flooding and is also very vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The frequency and severity of these disasters is likely to be adversely affected by global warming, population growth, environmental degradation, and ill-maintained infrastructure, all contributing to increase acute humanitarian needs.
High rates of acute malnutrition are compounded by repeated crises with insufficient time for affected people to recover between them. The effects of a recurrent natural disaster can significantly impact on peoples' food security status and exhaust their coping capacities. In this context, every disaster is putting a significant number of extremely poor and vulnerable people in urgent need of humanitarian aid. Despite increased food availability at national level, in all of the crisis affected areas GAM rates are regularly reported to be not only above the globally accepted humanitarian threshold (WHO) of 15%, but in many cases even above 20%.