Urban environment and sustainable livelihood: The case of Khulna city, Bangladesh

Abstract

The present study aims to address the situation of vulnerable people living in urban areas in context of their access to natural resources and sustainable livelihood. It attempts to identify the links between urban environment and vulnerable peoples’ in southern Bangladesh, especially in five selected locations- Rupsha, Khalishpur, Tutpara, Nirala and Gollamari in Khulna city. The data of this study were collected through applying quantitative (survey) and qualitative (case study, Focus Group Discussion and observation) methods. To assess the nature of urban environment in context of sustainable urban environment for vulnerable people, the respondents were selected by using Simple Random Sampling.Considering Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) the vulnerable people were assessed as poor whose monthly family income is not more than 10000 taka and residing at the study area for at least 10 years. Moreover, tenure insecurity, income, food, number of jobless week, literacy, access to health and access to household goods, were considered to measure the condition of vulnerability.After conducting census from the population (1414 households) fifty percent (707 households head) were selected as unit of analysis. The findings of the study indicate that the settlement of the study population in Khulna City started slowly with rural to urban migration. For understanding urban livelihood risk and to identify the causal relationship between sustainable livelihoodsin urban environment, a reliable Sustainable Livelihood Index (SLI) has been created. The sustainable urban livelihood has been measured by seven indicators viz. natural resource, financial asset, occupation, vulnerability, coping with disaster, social resource and physical asset. The result shows that the value of R2is 0.993. It means that aforesaid variables have 99 percent effect on the sustainable livelihood of urban population. The mean SLI (74.61) indicates that majority of the respondents endure low level of sustainability that means that they have low access to natural and socio- economic resources.Most of the respondents (71.85%) in the study area live in slums. More than 69 percent of the respondents live in below poverty line 1. Among the respondents 32.2 percent were always threated under tenure insecurity, 14.7 percent considering themselves severely suffered from food insecurity and are characterized by tenure (48%) and employment (60%) insecurity. A combination of human and natural factors results in various urban hazards such as flooding and waterlogging due to poor drainage, urban fires and windstorms causes havoc especially in slums. It is identified from the study that natural resources especially land, tree, water bodies, agricultural activities positively contribute to income, food, health, housing and social relations. The regression coefficients indicates that the natural resource contribute (22%) to enhance the financial resources. It is also found that access to land, water and tree species contribute to enrich food (23%), family income (16%), health (14%), social resource (21%) and reducing vulnerability in normal period and also during disaster (26%). Improved infrastructure and social asset have statistically significant positive effect on sustainable livelihood in Khulna city. The study also identifies the alternative employments and strategies for the sustainability of the livelihood of vulnerable people.