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The adoption of sustainable techniques in the built environment has swept the building industry. The social aspect is one of the three pillars of sustainability. Its core tenet is to increase human life quality by maintaining security. Due to the significant risks connected with construction and the unavoidability of employer-hazard relationships, security methods should be established to prevent accidents and injuries and thereby achieve this goal. Security measures are considered in this chapter as a crucial indication of a long-term project's viability. It considers security measures in terms of staff health and safety on building sites in comparison to end-user safety.

All over the world, Bangladesh is well known as a flood- and cyclone-affected country. But in the recent years the slow onset disaster of drought is more frequent in Bangladesh due to climatic as well as nonclimatic variability. As a consequence, agriculture along with its dependent farmers’ livelihoods tremendously experience its adverse impacts. Therefore, the main focus of this chapter is to discuss about drought, its effects on different sectors, and how in different levels a number of drought risk management actions are carried out to cope with this insidious disaster in the context of Bangladesh.

Of all the natural disasters, drought is the most gradual and the most hard to predict. However, this insidious disaster continually affects the lives and livelihoods of farmers living in drought-affected areas. The northwestern part of Bangladesh is recognized as being more severely affected by drought than the rest of the country, as drought is a recurring event in this area. It has substantial impacts on agriculture and causes great suffering for farmers – in particular, poor and small farmers, who are more vulnerable to drought. Therefore, this study tries to illustrate farmers’ existing coping practices with regard to drought. It also addresses their prioritized adaptation practices, which are based on local context and available resources. This study not only focuses on the implementation of these adaptation practices from the national to the local level, but it also mentions various roles of stakeholders and a definite timeframe for each adaptation practice.

The restrictive measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic put a halt to everything across the world. The global crisis hit every sphere of life. The mobility restrictive nature of the pandemic was a major blow to the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. For a country like Pakistan, with an unstable economy and struggling tourism, the pandemic served as ground zero. This chapter critically examines tourism dimensions in Pakistan and how it sustained the impact of various crises. It pays attention to the concepts of vulnerability, social and community resilience, and adaptive capacity to provide a theoretical understanding of the revival of tourism in Pakistan. It also considers the impact of COVID-led measures on the tourism industry and corresponding initiatives of the government. The chapter concludes by arguing that Pakistan should carefully monitor and assess the current debates on tourism policies and practices. The chapter suggests that the national tourism strategy should incorporate a mechanism that can address tourism in crises in addition to addressing the environmental, socio-cultural and economic impact of tourism.

The northwestern region of Bangladesh has experienced drought more in recent years than earlier decades because of high rainfall variability accompanied by high temperature. As Bangladesh is an agro-based country, agriculture and its dependent farmers’ livelihood face substantial impacts. To cope with drought, farmers of this region performed various adaptation measures by their own efforts along with institutional support. But these efforts and support are not sufficient enough for them to endure drought. Therefore, this chapter discloses how to measure drought-affected areas and identify action-oriented drought-adaptive practices of farmers that will enhance drought risk management policy and actions in northwestern Bangladesh.

This chapter investigates the presence of a difference in the systemic risk level between Islamic and conventional banks in Bangladesh. The authors compare systemic resilience of three types of banks: fully fledged Islamic banks, purely conventional banks (CB), and CB with Islamic windows. The authors use the market-based systemic risk measures of marginal expected shortfall and systemic risk to identify which type is more vulnerable to a systemic event. The authors also use ΔCoVaR to identify which type contributes more to a systemic event. Using a sample of observations on 27 publicly traded banks operating over the 2005–2014 period, the authors find that CB is the least resilient sector to a systemic event, and is the one that has the highest contribution to systemic risk during crisis times.

Many people as well as the government in Bangladesh perceive floods and cyclones as recurrent environmental hazards in the country. They also view that these two hazards are the main contributors to crop loss in the country. But, in reality, droughts afflict the country at least as frequently as do major floods and cyclones, averaging about once in 2.5 years (Adnan, 1993, p. 1; Erickson, 1993, p. 5; Hossain 1990, p. 33). In some years, droughts not only cause a greater damage to crops than floods or cyclones, but they also generally affect more farmers across a wider area (Paul, 1995). If not institutionally and economically tackled, the consequences tend to have a far-reaching effect on the given society, and the socioeconomic problems would assume a chronic pattern.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on the regional impacts of Climate Change (IPCC, 2007a), a drastic change in rainfall patterns in the warmer climate would occur in Bangladesh, and it may experience a 5% to 6% increase of rainfall by 2030 due to glacier melting and more intense monsoons, which will create frequent large and prolonged floods as well as an increase in droughts outside the monsoon season. Furthermore, in the context of global warming, most of the climatic models project a decrease in precipitation in the dry season and an increase during the monsoon season in south Asia (Christensen et al., 2007). This will cause a combination of more extreme floods and droughts in this region. Therefore, the moderately drought-affected areas will be turned into severely drought-prone areas within next 20 to 30 years (IPCC, 2007b).

Introduction: As the human population grows, consumer demand for digital services tailored to their specific needs also increases. To improve the financial performance of farms and meet the need for food of a growing population, farmers and agribusinesses have started incorporating distributed ledger technology into agricultural and farm management software. These developments in the agriculture sector may lead to realising sustainable development goals.

Purpose: Several researchers have done studies to explore the features and benefits of blockchain technology in the field of agriculture. There is a need to analyse the available literature to identify the use of this technology in agriculture and the scope of further research. This chapter will mainly focus on its publication trend, journal productivity and impact, prolific studies, and coherent themes.

Methodology: For a comprehensive review, bibliometric and content analysis of 71 open-access articles collected through a structured database of Mendeley is done. These articles were published during 2017–2021.

Findings: The execution of blockchain is continuously increasing in the agriculture sector, which has resulted in automation in supply chain management, land registrations, and crop insurance. The study revolves around supply chain management, digitisation of agriculture, and sustainable economic development. This study’s conclusions can help agriculturalists improve their understanding of blockchain implementation in agriculture. The study also gives directions for future research.