Sustainable Landscape Management of Bangladesh

Landscape management is an integral part of natural conservation, food security and biodiversity; provides livelihoods and influences the climatic factors like humidity, temperature, precipitation and wind, and acts as an important component of disaster risk reduction. Landscapes provide safety against adverse conditions like cyclones, storms, droughts and floods etc. Undulated surface keeps the natural systems moving and provides increased surface area. Nature has its own laws and change is universal; still humans often govern the natural systems and their biased activities accelerate the changes including landscape. With rapid industrialization, urbanization and road transportation systems etc., many changes have occurred and most of the natural systems are being disturbed. Thus, climate change effects have accentuated the disasters like cyclones, tornadoes, tidal surges, floods, droughts and erosion. The landscape and the soil phases of the great Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna basins have been changed due to expansion of flatland irrigation-dependent agriculture destroying hills and hill forests, wet bodies; construction of dams and embankments, roads and highways across the floodplains and natural flows of streams and rivers. Traditional floodplain management systems were also destroyed for irrigating crop during and after the Green Revolution. The ponds were common in every home and the houses were built on the raised land and there were a nice synchronization for livelihoods and survival.
Therefore, to secure the lives, livelihoods need to manage natural systems wisely and logically. It is essential to conserve and maintain the significant or characteristic features of a landscape, which is greatly valued on account of its distinctive natural or cultural configuration. This paper reflects on the importance of the landscape in environmental sustainability and for a comprehensive disaster risk reduction (DRR) policy. It also analyzes the related issues ahead to achieve an effective landscape management policy for adoption of appropriate disaster risk reduction strategy.
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Director, CGEC International University of Business Agriculture and Technology Bangladesh