This study assesses climate disaster resilience in Patuakhali Municipality, a climate-exposed coastal town in Bangladesh, through a systematic application of the Climate Disaster Resilience Index (CDRI). The research adopts a mixed-method design that integrates primary and secondary data. Primary data were collected through a structured questionnaire survey of 100 purposively selected respondents with more than ten years of professional or community engagement in the municipality. Secondary data were drawn from municipal records, planning documents, and relevant policy reports. The CDRI framework was operationalized through a composite index approach, where indicators were scored, weighted, and aggregated to generate dimension-specific and overall resilience scores. Statistical averaging and comparative analysis were used to identify relative strengths and weaknesses across sectors. The findings indicate that overall resilience in Patuakhali Municipality is moderate, but unevenly distributed. Social capacity and institutional coordination significantly strengthen preparedness and response mechanisms, reflecting strong community networks, awareness, and collaboration between local authorities and external actors. However, structural vulnerabilities in housing quality, sanitation systems, environmental governance, and hazard management reduce long-term adaptive capacity. The results suggest that resilience in coastal secondary cities is strongly shaped by governance effectiveness and social capital, yet remains constrained by infrastructural and ecological fragilities. This imbalance highlights the risk of overestimating resilience when institutional and social strengths mask persistent physical and environmental weaknesses. The novelty of this study lies in its detailed, municipality-level operationalization of the CDRI in a secondary coastal urban context of Bangladesh, where empirical resilience measurement remains limited. Unlike many existing studies that focus either on macro-scale vulnerability mapping or single-hazard assessments, this research provides a multidimensional, indicator-based evaluation grounded in local stakeholder knowledge. By translating a conceptual resilience framework into an empirically validated municipal assessment, the study fills a gap in localized resilience quantification and contributes practical insights for evidence-based urban climate adaptation planning in rapidly changing coastal regions.
Faisal et al. (Mon,) studied this question.