02/02/2024
First of all, I want to express my gratitude to Ambassador Riaz Hamidullah for attending our meeting at Wageningen University & Research yesterday. I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to all who participated in our discussion, and special appreciation to Kalyan Chakravarthy Guntuboyina for organizing the initiation of exploring various solutions to address the challenges posed by sea level rise and floods due to climate change. We have gained valuable insights from the discussion held yesterday. In the upcoming period, we will provide an update regarding research in Bangladesh.
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Ambassador of Bangladesh to the Netherlands, concurrently to Bosnia & Herzegovina and Croatia (previously to Sri Lanka) Riaz Hamidullah
Thnx Arch. Misak Terzibasiyan for floating the idea of 'floating houses' in , at
& Research, joined by Kalyan Chakravarthy Guntuboyina, Prof Edward Huijbens, Dr Lawrence Jones-Walters, Catharien Terwisscha van Scheltinga, Fátima Pereira da Silva, Dr Jan Verhagen and connecting Prof Chris Zevenbergen/IHE Delft Institute for Water Education.
The proposition of testing, developing (design of) and introducing floating homes in an active, populous delta is novel. Especially where land is the scarce-most resource while people's identity-culture-vocation considerably revolve around land and undertaking any economic activity comes as a trade-off with optimum use of land. Conventional understanding of monsoon 'flooding' and 'rising sea level' do call for a deep dive into an idea as this. Worth noting that Bangladesh has been familiar with centuries' old 'floating (vegetable) farming' practice, esp. in southern Bangladesh.
As the most densely-populated land, Bangladesh sees 'choices' of people at the bottom rung of development in building their homes changing. In the past, homes were made of traditional materials e.g. mud/thatched roof/bamboo. Those are fast being replaced with corrugated tin and earthern bricks-cement-rod. While use of materials change, a deeper look reveal that the key social and cultural features still determine of newly-built houses e.g. ensuring privacy (as a hamlet), provision to store grains, keeping domestic cattle/poultry.
As we all reflected with diverse thoughts/perspectives, certain aspects/questions surfaced:
- How does an ordinary villager view his/her 'home'? Is it as an economic necessity or equally as one's societal norms and cultural traits?
- Use of (new) materials like bricks using precious 'topsoil' is a key development challenge in Bangladesh. How do we make sturdy yet cost-effective alternatives available to a poor household?
- How best to provision and kitchen in a new (rural) home design? How to dispose of generated?
- Where a home is actually a homestead, composed of families, how to make a 'sustainably designed (village) home' attractive to the family blending cultural elements?
Finding answers to those surely would be challenging, in Bangladesh as also across populous parts of S Asia and S-E Asia. In a fast-urbanising delta like Bangladesh, arriving at a (economically) viable - (environmentally) sustainable - (culturally) acceptable design/solution is real as available land for homes shrink in the years ahead. It's assuring to hear what Mr. Verhagen concluded with, "...in WUR, we don't give up on testing the most daunting of the challenges..!" Perhaps, we need to re-conceive !
Dutch Fund for Climate and Development Ministerie van Economische Zaken en Klimaat Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken Netherlands Enterprise Agency Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences Delft University of Technology Eindhoven University of Technology TNO
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