At the 4th conference of Digital Belt and Road  (DBAR) network held in Shenzhen, China in December 2019, Professor Tanjil Sowgat from our Bangladesh team presented research findings highlighting the scale and extent of land cover changes in rapidly urbanising Bangladeshi cities as well as data challenges regarding inequality and segregation studies in South Asian countries.

DBAR is international scientific program for sustainable development of the countries along the silk route of China  and aims to bring together academics and professionals to influence future policy making in this region.

Download a copy of Professor Sowgat’s presentations in the links below.

Professor Sowgat delivered two presentations. The first  highlighted on the scale and extent of land cover changes in rapidly urbanising Bangladeshi cities. Research findings called for the promotion of migrant sensitive policies to best accommodate new migrants in the disaster affected areas and a new development control mechanism to protect agriculture and water bodies.

In his second presentation, Professor Sowgat focused on data challenges regarding inequality and segregation studies in South Asian countries and stressed the need for creating and sharing of data for better understanding the key development issues.

Our Bangladeshi team are now part of the DBAR research network, which aims to make effective contribution to bring changes to future sustainable policies in coastal regions. The benefits of this network are already coming to fruition.

The DBAR-COAST Co-Chair Professor Zhang Li expressed support to be involved in extending impact activities in different Chinese cities. As part of ongoing collaboration, Dr Bowei Chen, Assistant Professor at the Chinese Academy of Science has been awarded funding through our Capacity Development Acceleration Fund to collaborate with Khulna University on an urban research project exploring transformation of agricultural land and waterbodies in rapidly urbanising Bangladesh.