Why Cambridge & Southern Bangladesh?

Climate change imposes three globally constant threats: average temperature rise, extreme weather, and sea level rise. These threats affect coastal communities around the world, actualizing various risks which depend on each area’s unique vulnerabilities. However, the diversity of coastal communities worldwide necessitates specific solutions in order to respond to these unique risks. We examined two regions as case studies: the Greater Boston area in Massachusetts (focusing on the MIT campus and Cambridge) and Bangladesh (focusing on the southern coastal regions). The highly differentiated nature of these two regions allows us to create not only solutions specific to the two areas, but also solutions applicable to a broad spectrum of coastal regions with varying characteristics.

We selected five regional attributes to examine the differences between Cambridge and Bangladesh: population density, infrastructure, local industry, public support, and available resources.

Despite the city of Boston being one of the densest cities in the US by population, the greater Boston metropolitan area has a very low population density for an urban area (defined as a city with over 2.5 million inhabitants) in the United States. With an estimated 2016 population of 4,794,447,[1] and a total area of 4500 square miles, the greater Boston metropolitan area has a population density of 1065.5 people per square mile. Although the population density for the country of Bangladesh is low at 1252[2] per square mile, the cities in Bangladesh are some of the densest in the world (Dhaka ranking first at 115,000 per square mile,[3] and Chittagong also ranked high with almost 70,000). Combined with the fact that the infrastructure in Boston is entirely urban (paved roads, large buildings, and permanent utility systems) and Bangladesh has both urban and rural regions, the two regions represent the extreme densities and living styles on the spectrum of coastal communities.

With respect to the industries that inhabitants of a region work in, Boston and Bangladesh are located far from each other on the spectrum. The local industry in Boston is quite diverse, but the larger sub-industries include finance, high technology, education, and medicine. In contrast, a majority of the industry in in Bangladesh is agriculture and textile exports, with a large portion of the population relying on subsistence farming for food.  Additionally, the public awareness of efforts to respond to climate change and the resources available to carry out these efforts are drastically different in Bangladesh and the Cambridge areas. The city of Boston and the surrounding communities are some of the most supportive and active communities and affecting climate change resiliency in the world.[4] However, in Bangladesh, over 60% of adults have never heard of climate change.[5] Finally, Bangladesh and the Cambridge metropolitan area have drastically different amounts of available resources available to adapt to climate change. The Boston-Cambridge-Newton metropolitan area has a GDP of 77,502 USD per capita.[6] The GDP for the country of Bangladesh is 1,359 USD per capita.[7]

In short, Cambridge and southern Bangladesh together contain regions of dense and sparse population, urban and rural development, agricultural and technological industries, highly informed and poorly informed citizens, and available and unavailable resources to mitigate problems form climate change. The differences between the Cambridge and Bangladesh make them ideal case studies for preparing coastal communities for climate change, and cover much of the spectrum under which other coastal communities fall. Therefore we move forward examining these two locations separately.  

By: Christian Schillinger

References

  1. 2016 Population Estimates. (2016). United States Census Bureau, Population Division. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov
  2. Population density (people per sq. km of land area). (2017). The World Bank. Retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST
  3. Murphy, D. (2017, May 11). Where is the world’s densest city? Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/may/11/where-world-most-densely- populated-city
  4. Officials celebrate Boston’s leadership on climate resilience. (2017, October 20). City of Boston. Retrieved from https://www.boston.gov/news/officials-celebrate-bostons-leadership-climate-resilience
  5. Climate Change Awareness and Concern in 119 Countries. (2015, July 27). Yale Climate Communication. Retrieved from http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/analysis-of-a-119-country-survey-predicts-global-climate-change-awareness/
  6. Hinson, J. R., Panek, S. D. & Rodriguez, R. M. (2017). Gross Domestic Product by Metropolitan Area: New Statistics for 2016 and Updated Statistics for 2001–2015. Survey of Current Business, (October, 2017). Retrieved from https://www.bea.gov/regional/articles.cfm
  7. GDP per capita (current US$). (n.d.). Retrieved November 26, 2017, from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD