The rural coastal households susceptible to this poverty-environment trap are therefore highly vulnerable to the increase in coastal hazards induced by climate change, which either threaten directly their livelihoods or indirectly through impacting the key coastal and near-shore ecosystems on which their livelihoods depend. Two types of climate change impacts especially affect the poor: short-lived natural disasters with immediate and often extreme impacts, such as flooding and storm surge, and long-term climatic changes with more gradual impacts, such as sea-level rise, saline intrusion and erosion. These hazards either degrade the coastal and marine systems and resources on which households depend or inflict losses in income and productivity on the households (see Figure 3). Thus, climate change impacts can reinforce the povertyenvironment trap faced poor coastal households, and for many others, tip them into the trap.

The rural poor in coastal areas are especially vulnerable to natural disaster shocks, such as hurricanes, tsunamis, floods and other extreme coastal events (Badola and Hussein 2005; Barbier 2008; Carter et al. 2007; Das and Vincent 2009; Laso Bayas et al. 2011; McSweeney 2005). In addition, the inadequate protection infrastructure in rural areas, such as storm shelters, seawalls and embankments, means that poor rural households are often reliant on “natural barriers”, such as mangroves, for protection. For example, two studies based on the 1999 cyclone that struck Orissa, India found that mangroves significantly reduced the number of deaths as well as damages to property, livestock, agriculture, fisheries and other assets (Badola and Hussain 2005; Das and Vincent 2009). Statistical analysis indicates that there would have been 1.72 additional deaths per village within 10 km of the coast if the mangrove width along shorelines had been reduced to zero (Das and Vincent 2009). Losses incurred per household were greatest ($154) in a village that was protected by an embankment but had no mangroves compared to losses per household ($33) in a village protected only by mangrove forests (Badola and Hussain 2005). However, evidence from Thailand indicates that poor coastal households are less willing to participate in mangrove replanting schemes, even though they are aware of the storm protection benefits of mangroves, because of the high opportunity cost of their labor and lack of community control over the management of the restored mangroves (Barbier 2008). In many developing regions, poor households rely on natural resources not for protection against storms and other environmental shocks but as insurance and coping strategies for avoiding the income and subsistence losses associated with such disasters (Carter et al. 2007; McSweeney 2005).

Many areas of coastal Bangladesh are suffering from the effects of saltwater intrusion on agriculture (Dasgupta et al. 2014; Haque and Jahan 2013; Rabbani et al. 2013; Shameem et al. 2014). In the southwest coastal region of Bangladesh, saltwater intrusion into surface and ground water is already causing impacts on livelihoods, land holdings and land use change. In one study area, over a period of 10 years 70% of farmers partially or fully abandoned agriculture due to saline soil and either converted their fields to shrimp ponds or sold land to richer farmers. Nearly three-quarters of the households also gave up cattle raising, due to lack of animal feed in the area from saltwater intrusion impacts on fodder production (Shameen et al. 2014). In other 28