Environment Conservation and Climate Resilience
Climate change is already having significant global impacts on weather, especially on the frequency, concentration, duration, and spatial extent of extreme events. Climate change is expected to alter species distributions, modify ecological processes, and exacerbate environmental degradation . To offset these effects, the need is greater than ever for strategic land conservation. Conservationists have long prioritized land acquisitions based on rare species or natural community locations. Now a way is needed to set priorities that will conserve biological diversity and maintain ecological functions, despite climate-driven changes in community composition and species locations.
TAHZINGDONG has been working to create a climate-resilient conservation portfolio in CHT as well as to identify potential conservation areas based on geophysical characteristics that influence a site’s resilience to climate change. These sites represent the overall geophysical settings for the landscape diversity. At the very beginning in collaboration with ARONYAK Foundation and USFS, mapped geophysical settings across the entire geophysical setting with diverse topography that were highly connected by natural cover at Bandarban Hill District.
The landscape restoration systems applied by TAHZINGDONG is an integrated and multidisciplinary approach to generate ecosystem services, which envelops agroforestry, tree plantations, and eco-friendly traditional agro-systems and practices that are used to contribute to increasing the sustainability of agricultural systems and their resilience to climate change in Bandarban Hill District.
Since its inception, TAHZINGDONG has been working on Environment Conservation and Climate Resilience through:
- Forest Landscape Restoration;
- Protect and preserve the Community Managed Mouza Forest/Village Common Forest (VCF) or Community Conserve Area (CCA);
- Preserve community reserve forest through VCF, the plantation in streamside, GFS installation, and providing revolving fund to the community for livelihood development aimed to intake community forest and also maintain biodiversity;
- Collaboration, Preparation, and Resilience to Natural and Human-Induced Disaster in Cox’s Bazar and Bandarban District Build the capacity of Climate vulnerable communities, especially women, to deal with the vulnerability of climate change-related eco-social impacts;
- Facilitate /strengthen the networks of partners and other CSO’s and disseminate best practices of community-based climate change adaptation models;
- Promote context-specific, eco-system friendly and climate-adaptive agricultural practices for climate-vulnerable communities in Bandarban Sadar& Rowangchari Upazila;
- Sensitize and make responsive LGIs and public service providers to respond appropriately to climate-vulnerable;
- Livelihoods and value chains implementation in and around headwater RFs, PAs, and VCFs:
- Create Mass Awareness for restoration and conservation of forests and wildlife.