Commentary | Souhardya De & Lir Hoxhaj, Relief and Rehabilitation: Foreign HADRA Response to the Remal Cyclone, 2024 and Broader Implications for Disaster Risk Financing in Bangladesh
On the 26th of May, 2024, Remal, a deep-depression turned cyclone, made landfall in Bangladesh and eastern-India, including districts in the state of West Bengal, affecting over four million people. In Bangladesh, with electric poles uprooted, homes destroyed or inundated, and cell-phone towers forced offline, this resulted in widespread displacement and loss of access to the energy-grid and connectivity across its vulnerable coastal districts. Initial assessments put the losses at over $600 million – one of the costliest natural disasters faced by the nation in this decade.
An Asian Development Bank-led study on disaster risk-financing in Bangladesh in the last decade revealed a staggering gap of $8 billion between losses incurred and response funding made available. Moreover, the government’s latest risk-financing strategy has acknowledged the gap of response and reconstruction financing at $880 million and $4.0 billion. This means one of Bangladesh’s disaster-management policy priorities has been to actively seek humanitarian and disaster-relief assistance from international fiscal establishments and ‘development partner’ governments.
In light of this, foreign aid has featured substantially in the literature of development studies about Bangladesh, especially ones concerned with its disaster-response strategy. Despite being viewed as an ambiguous factor in fuelling economic growth and poverty alleviation, analysts have favourably assessed its impact on developing the nation’s disaster-response capacity and preparation for future contingencies, especially in case of periodic moderate disasters where the government faces significant funding gaps. Bangladesh’s continued dependence on foreign aid was reinforced post-Remal, as the government supported a UN-led Humanitarian Coordination Task Team (HCTT), to draft a response strategy outlining losses suffered by the vulnerable communities, seeking foreign assistance as part of a Central Emergency Response Fund to manage the crisis.
However, the long-term viability of foreign-aided response has been variously questioned. Especially as reports have suggested Bangladesh’s climate-change-induced natural-disaster problem is projected to worsen, there exists an immediate need to channelise more sustainable funding to support project-oriented resilience-building rather than funding frequent short-term reliefs. The HADRA response to Remal, for instance, raises critical questions concerning effective sectoral allocation of emergency-response funds, lack of a coordination framework to secure timely disbursements, and the nature of foreign-intervention in the post-relief recovery and reconstruction efforts.
In response to Remal and the monsoon floods, total funds worth $79.8 million were sought by the UN’s inter-agency plan. This was initially $52.9 million, and the rest was added after a reassessment in wake of the floods. Of this, just over $14 million – merely 18.7%, has been met, with $1.8 million yet to be ‘paid’. This adds onto Bangladesh’s total receipt worth $374.6 million this financial year, around 96% of which has been received as part of an ongoing response to the Rohingya crisis.
What stands out is the dramatic discrepancy between the share of unmet requirements of the two coordinated plans. Whereas 40% of the annual requirements to manage the Rohingya crisis were met, a staggering 82% remains unfunded in the Remal response, and critical sectors such as water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), nutrition, and displacement management remain either under-funded or neglected altogether. Notably, separate appeals by international humanitarian agencies like IFRC have also fallen short of targets, raising 5.59% of total requirements.
This gap visibly reflects the broader global funding landscape, especially with a range of complex humanitarian crises worldwide. However, it also underscores a significant challenge that Bangladesh faces in mobilising timely and adequate humanitarian assistance for disaster-relief and reinforces the need for a sustainable strategy to combat future contingencies. For Remal, the state itself had been able to allocate immediate funds worth just $903,385. Major chunks of the emergency response, therefore, came from the already largely underfunded foreign-humanitarian aid.
Given the sheer number of operational agencies, the literature on HADRA operations in Bangladesh has prominently raised concerns regarding the overlap of priorities in allocation of response funds, further causing inefficiency in deployment. Post-Remal, for instance, this was visible in the lack of coordinated efforts dedicated specifically for long-term recovery and anticipatory assistance for vulnerable indigenous communities. Overwhelming emphasis on immediate relief by both state and non-state actors and absence of inter-agency coordination about shared priorities means much of the response was intended for short-term relief and ignored fundamental long-term concerns such as the gendered dynamic within relief-shelters and access to WASH facilities. While both UN and IFRC appeals regarded WASH facilities as needing critical addressal, overlapping prioritisation of immediate relief is observed to have partly led to its overwhelming neglect. In the inter-agency response, around 37% of food-security targets were met as against 5% for WASH. Much of the state’s aid was also deployed to this effect. This is in addition to the cash transfer provided as ‘anticipatory aid’ to over 150,000 individuals in the vulnerable districts pre-landfall. Meanwhile, despite reports outlining the adverse effects of contaminated water and over half the communities reporting access to WASH as ‘top-priority life-saving intervention’, this sector has remained virtually unfunded.
Although particular attention was paid to Bangladesh’s million-plus Rohingya refugees, with the UN-ICCG reporting effective utilisation of funds from the existing Rohingya response plan in risk-mitigation in wake of Remal, such efficiency remains unobserved for other similarly vulnerable communities. Ahead of the landfall, for instance, Rajbanshi and Munda indigenous communities in disaster-prone Satkhira, where studies have revealed appalling disproportionality in accessing clean water and purification, were reported voluntarily repairing embankments. Even a month later, reports indicated the lack of any coordinated assistance to alleviate their problems, with the local government mentioning that over 86% of the constituents continued to suffer from lack of access to safe-water in certain cases. This visible gap in addressing vulnerable communities uniformly raises serious questions concerning the nature of HADRA inflow and deployment.
Previous trends have demonstrated how lack of a proper coordination channel between stakeholders – public and private, leads to mismanagement and misappropriation of funds meant for specific purposes since the state, in many cases, remains unaware about their intended use. One obvious solution is to channel in more foreign aid to empower and alleviate concerns of the indigenous communities in the wake of disasters, as has been done to mitigate the Rohingya crisis.
This chronic dependence on response-specific foreign aid, however, is unsustainable, especially as the global landscape reflects a transition to long-term anticipatory and recovery-oriented assistance. Despite a myriad of operational funds aiming to aid countries like Bangladesh in managing climate-change induced disasters, such financing is bureaucratic, often failing to address specific challenges faced by local communities in times of need. As witnessed post-Remal, these complications severely undermine uniform channelling of funds and mitigation of chronic issues, making communities even more burdensome and widening the inequality gap. Furthermore, the shortcomings of present HADRA responses include the failure to ensure sectoral allocations adequately reflect community perspectives and priorities, meaning the marginalised are left to fend for themselves in the long-run and prepare for anticipated disasters, as in Satkhira. In 2019, estimations indicated that these families themselves funded over two times the government’s disaster-funding and twelve times that of foreign aid, effectively becoming largest contributors to disaster-preparedness by far.
The urgency to combat unexpected crises and natural disasters under these circumstances raises the importance of Bangladesh building its own fund, which in turn necessitates either trade-offs in its budget, the increase of its current public debt, or developing an entirely new stream of sustainable income for itself. Despite its reasonable budget deficit and public debt, the prospect of a potentially burgeoning sustainable blue-economy makes the latter a more attractive option.
Analysts have emphasised the incorporation of a bottom-up approach within Bangladesh’s disaster-response strategy, prioritising local capacity-building and preparedness attuned to localist concerns. Effectively promoting blue-economy transition in disaster-prone coastal areas, thus, has the potential to make disaster-risk financing community-driven and self-sustainable. Bangladesh’s sovereignty of resources in its exclusive economic zone of over 354 nautical miles ranks it 44th globally by maritime dependence, providing an untapped revenue-generation source for unexpected spending, as merely 4% of its economy is based on maritime activities. Beyond ecologically-damaging fishery, a framework of policies can be developed to facilitate trade, as Bangladesh is relatively less integrated in shipping networks. Another prospect is its transformation as a potential hub of climate-resilient infrastructure and research, which is feasible given its manufacturing “know-how”. The need to adopt a coastal construction-framework has often been advocated and community-driven planning should prioritise durable climate-resilient connectivity and coastal-housing.
Increased productivity and infrastructural investments along coastal areas, coupled with climate-education and volunteerism, can directly contribute to fund-generation within the vulnerable communities and create streams of usable income, which may help address the chronic financial burden presently placed on low-income families to recover and rebuild after crises. In wake of recent political instability and worsened frequency of natural disasters, evidenced by catastrophic floods post-Remal, harnessing Bangladesh’s blue-economy potential becomes even more consequential. This underscores the vital need for a strategic shift from reactive institutional financing to community-driven approaches integrated with anticipatory human security architecture – channelling revenue generated from the locally operational blue-economy sectors for self-sustainable asset generation, better quality of life, and tangible climate-resilient infrastructural development.
Author Profiles
Souhardya De is a Think Big scholar at the University of Bristol and Lavoie Fellow at the Mercatus Center.
Lir Hoxhaj is a Research and Teaching Assistant at the Imperial College Business School in London.
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Souhardya De & Lir Hoxhaj, “Relief and Rehabilitation: Foreign HADRA Response to the Remal Cyclone, 2024 and Broader Implications for Disaster Risk Financing in Bangladesh,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, November 25, 2024; https://doi.org/10.52698/RRQT3097.