Bangladesh is ranked seventh in the Global Climate Risk Index 2020 as the most vulnerable country to climate change. Repeated natural and manmade disasters have resulted in the country?s rapid depletion of natural resources causing a huge threat to its climate, environment, and economy at large. With these depleting trends of natural resources, declining biodiversity, and ecosystem services, the country had to accommodate more than a million Rohingya Refugees, added to own 168 million people which is already the most densely populated country in the world. Further deterioration is fueled by the global carbon emission due to human activities including the advanced use of technologies for farming, transportation, and manufacturing plants and on the other hand depletion of natural resources propelled by non-judicial use of the same to meet up the ever-increasing population and huge demands. natural resources.
Added to this, increased demand for land and natural resource base products, inappropriate or inadequate application of existing laws/policies/rules, and vested interest of the influential sections, protection and conservation efforts for natural resources and biodiversity are becoming largely ineffective. The situation is particularly dreadful in one of the country?s most important ecological zones ? the Cox?s Bazar reserve and protected forest areas including the Teknaf Peninsula. Where the additional more than a million population has directly contributed to the destruction of thousands of hectares of reserved forest, eventually depleting the surrounding areas including the Protected Areas of the landscape. Amidst, the Sheikh Jamal Inani National Park (SJINP) at Ukhiya is one of the ecologically important protected areas out of a total of 51 PAs of the country, yet extremely vulnerable. This particular PA is engulfed with multidimensional problems like encroachment, poaching, illegal hill cutting, increase human wildlife (elephants in particular), and expansion of unplanned tourism and other establishments for various economic activities. The Forest Department, with its insufficient human resources and inadequate associated facilities, is struggling to protect the landscape and conserve biodiversity including the rapid loss of habitats for wildlife. On the other hand, lack of awareness of the mass population on the importance of natural resource management, and the absence of proper nature-based solutions to protect some of the threatened species like red crabs and sea turtles, which were previously abundant in the adjacent seabeach, are about to extinct. Therefore, the proposed project will strengthen the community-based conservation of threatened species and biodiversity through co-management, mitigating of human-elephant conflict, formation of youth conservation groups, and capacity building of community people through training, and awareness-raising sessions will be expected to promote the conservation of 390 Ha areas as natural habitats of red crabs and sea turtles, in addition to other important wildlife. The project also proposes sustainable engagement of 182 beneficiaries in enterprise development and more than 3000 people will gain the knowledge and skills on NRM while targeted plantation will ensure land stabilization and will reduce the overall of experiencing natural shocks.