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The proces s of urbanization is a universal phenomenon taking place all over the world. All countries are prone to this phenomenon mainly determined by the increase in population growth, economy and infrastructure initiatives. Bangladesh is one of the world's most densely populated countries and it has faced rapid population growth throughout the last century. Unplanned urbanization leads to land-use change and creates not only noisy and unhealthy environment but also inadequate infrastructure facilities and poor living condition. This study is an attempt to work on residential land use suitability assessment through the application of Geographic Information System (GIS) and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. In the study, the development of the main criterion and sub-criterion factors selected for suitability analysis were used in the Saaty's pairwise comparison of Analytic Hierarchy Process technique (AHP) for getting the weight for each of the criteria. To reflect the preferences towards a certain factor, definite to very strong preferences was given to that factor in their pair wise comparison. The consistency was checked to verify the reliability of the results of the study. Each of the input themes was assigned a weight influence based on its importance, then multiplying the given weights by each of the factor maps in the form of a Weighting Overlay process. The system integrates two major tools (GIS and AHP) in a manner that reach the correct solution to assist the decision-makers in determining appropriate values for the suitability criteria. This method would help planners and policy-makers in formulating urban growth policies and strategies of the city.

Climate change has occurred naturally over time due to conditional drift, cosmological cycle and changes in volcanic activity and solar energy. Industrial revolutions have changed the balance of natural equilibrium of earth’s climate constituent, making atmosphere warmer than its natural rhythm eventually causing catastrophic consequences on geographically vulnerable countries, which is an established fact by several international organizations including IPCC. Among the vulnerable countries, Bangladesh is facing increasing trend of climatic hazard along with extreme super event. North-western region of Bangladesh is mostly vulnerable to drought. Within the last two decades (1994–2013), annual average maximum temperature has increased by 0.16 °C and the average minimum temperature is forecasted to be increased by 1.3 °C at the end of this century considering the four decadal (1964–2013) trend. Over the last two decades i.e. 1994–2003 and 2004–2013, the annual average rainfall has calculated 151.50 and 138.09 mm, respectively. Rainfall has decreased quite significantly in the last decade. From 1995 humidity level is found to be static in nature. North-western region is an important agricultural hub of Bangladesh. Decrease in rainfall and its seasonal variability have made the region more dependent on ground water for irrigation. Spatial and trend analysis shows groundwater depletion trend is getting steeper in this region. On the other hand, surface water level for every district, except for Pabna, shows negative skewedness. Increasing trend in maximum temperature stimulating high evaporation as well as uncertainty of trans-boundary water movement is found to be strongly influencing the depletion of surface water level. These circumstances are making North-western region more vulnerable towards drought.

Background: The unregulated proliferation of the urban private health care sector in LMICs like Bangladesh is a serious policy concern. More rational planning, however, requires systematic methods of documenting and analyzing facility service informatio. Given growing geographic and socioeconomic inequities in urban health, there is a critical need for tools that facilitate evidence-based planning for effective coverage of urban health services. Objective: Using health facility data from five city corporations in Bangladesh, we developed a web-based interactive data visualization tool with GIS functionality named the Urban Health Atlas (UHA). This user-friendly tool has various applications related to health service planning, referral and regulation, with specialized functions for policy makers, providers and the general public. Methods: The UHA is architecturally segmented into three tiers: (i) a presentation tier arrays data in a visual and quantifiable manner using JS/HTML/CSS; (ii) a middle tier which refers to the business logic or algorithm (iii) a database tier provides access to the DBMS using PHP and MySQL, and contains detailed facility information including GPS coordinates, road networks, administrative boundaries and population census data. Results: The outputs of UHA are map, data and chart views, Choropleth maps, shortest path calculations, service area calculations based on road networks, dynamic filter options, optimized searching capacity, clustering and classification. UHA also permits different levels of access for data entry, update and verification. Implications: The UHA provides a comprehensive, spatio-temporal health information infrastructure for urban areas that complements the national health information system. It can also function as a web-based platform for other geo-spatial data visualization applications such as disease and vulnerability mapping in resource-constraint countries.