Abstract:
Khulna, the third largest metropolis of Bangladesh has been identified as one of the 15 most
vulnerable coastal cities under climate change. Approximately 20% to 25% territory of the
country is inundated during the monsoon, which will be exacerbated due to the climate
change, especially in the coastal region. Khulna City is home to around 1.3 million people
and is within the Khulna Development Authority (KDA) area of which land use structure is
consisted of 46% residential, 18% agriculture, 15% industrial, and 5% commercial. The land
use pattern here has been substantially influenced by the flow of the Rupsha and
Bhairab Rivers. The whole metropolitan area is poorly drained and approximately 2.5m
above the mean sea level. Such low elevation of the city is an obstacle to the development of
a proper land use plan. Climate change effect especially sea level rise and flooding is being
added to this problem and the situation is supposed to be aggravated in the future. The
structure plan prepared by Khulna Development Authority (KDA) in 2000 for regulating
growth till 2020 considered a number of factors but it did not consider the climate change
impacts. Therefore, it is pivotal to analyze the land use plan and policies of KDA
development plan in the light of climate change induced flood effects. Flood damage analysis
needs to be carried out with the help of Digital Elevation Model of Flood and stage-damage
functions using Geographic Information System (GIS) grid-based approach for analyzing the
proposed land use plan and policies. This approach is classified further into two namely
aggregated land use based and object-oriented (building foot- print). Due to simplification
and having lack of available data, aggregated land use based approach has been selected.
Flood damage will provide better understating of the future flood risk, which facilitate the
decision makers especially KDA in taking the appropriate actions on flood mitigations and
preventions, and making any change on the on-going projects or assessing the Structure Plan
and development needs of the city as well. Research findings show that the climate change
will cause damage to property at different parts of the city depending on land use in 2020.
Maximum damage is estimated to commerce sector (1937 million Taka) and next to
industrial sector (124 million Taka). Minimum damage is estimated to agricultural sector
after residential use. Proposed commercial land uses are recommended to be reviewed for
relocation in flood free areas of the city.
