How households adapt to heat wave for livable habitat? A case of medium-sized city in Bangladesh

Heatwave is now becoming an alarming climate-induced shock in Bangladesh. Several investigations mainly focus on the impacts of heatwave and mitigation strategies on megacity and urban heat islands. However, understanding adaptation strategies for livable habitat to the heatwave in a medium-sized city like Rajshahi, located north-western region of Bangladesh, are not well articulated. Therefore, how city dwellers can be adapted to the heatwave in a medium-sized city is crucial to academia, GO's, and NGO's policymakers. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the household adaptation strategies for livable habitat to the heatwave in Rajshahi city corporation (RCC) areas where the overall livelihood of the city dwellers has been severely affected due to heatwave. The findings are based on empirical data collected through field observation, household surveys, and key informant interviews (KII) with a semi-structured questionnaire in RCC. A pre-tested questionnaire was developed to collect primary data from 300 respondents in Rajshahi. Sample sizes were chosen by using the purposive sampling technique. The study found three types of adaptation strategies: 1) structural: designed cooling facilities, uses of air conditioner and cooler; 2) non-structural: drinking plenty of water, staying indoors, taking a bath, sitting beside water bodies; and (3) community innovations based: sitting under big tree and riverside, keeping water reservoir in the room, opening multiple windows, roof and courtyard gardening, wall painting by white color. The community innovation-based adaptation strategies have shown high effectiveness among all types of adaptation strategies for making livable habitats for the heatwave at the household level. Therefore, it can be a significant component of adopting a policy to address the adverse impacts of the heatwave in the medium-sized city of Bangladesh besides structural and non-structural adaptation strategies.